Shape Computation Lab


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Back to the Future

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In 1802 Jean-Nicholas-Louis Durand published his book Précis of the Lectures on Architecture with no less ambition than to revolutionize architectural pedagogy and production. Emphatically, and obsessively, Durand completed his book with the chapter “Procedure to Be Followed in the Composition of any Project”. The Design and Research Studio Back to the Future takes on Durand’s theoretical proposition and uses it as a platform to inquire and test its claims, conventions and expressiveness and to ultimately elicit a constructive response by each student to this body of theoretical work in the form of a design proposition embedded within current theories and practices of architecture.

The first stage focuses on the rigorous reconstruction of Durand’s method in the Shape Machine for Rhino – a software application that is currently developed at SCL at the School of Architecture at Georgia Tech. The students will read the Précis, draft the compositional rules that are explicitly stated in the book and postulate the design of other rules to make a complete specification of a rule-based system to generate the designs illustrated in the Précis (and more too).  

The second stage shifts the focus of the studio to individual expression and critical engagement with current theories and practices of architecture. The module will kick-off with Schinkel’s transformative strategies in design and use them as a springboard to invite a range of contemporary transformative strategies suggested by each student. The deliverables for the second half of the semester include formal specifications of building types and/or complete specifications of site-specific projects

Landhuggers 

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Low-rise linear structures (landhuggers) are a powerful urban and architectural mechanism to produce affordable, sustainable and energy-efficient architecture: landhuggers maximize surface exposure to contained volume and keep proximity to the ground.  The Landhuggers studio takes on the formal exploration of this morphological type and tests its fit and formative impact in housing design – and especially low-cost, modular, affordable housing.  The brief of the studio is typically aligned with current international architectural competitions during the studio or sponsored opportunities as they arise.  

The first module focuses on a formal study of landhuggers though analog rule-based design methods. Brief exercises with physical models will study the notion of three-dimensional planar growth. A workshop in formal composition using Froebel’s Kindergarten blocks kick-offs the module to open up the fundamentals of the formal strategies used in the studio and continues with a workshop in Shape Machine for Rhino – a software developed at SCL at Georgia Tech– to showcase the modeling and editing of architectural ideas in terms of visual replacement rules defined in Rhino. The module concludes with transformational studies of actual built landhuggers though digital rule-based design methods in sets of designs in successive degrees of affinity to the original designs.  

The second – and main module of the studio – puts in practice the lessons learned in the first two studies using the current brief of the studio. The spatial and functional relations privileged by each student should be pertinent to the brief at hand and the precedent analysis undertaken by each student.

Shaping Justice 

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The architecture of judicial buildings has been increasingly receiving the interest of academics, architects, lawyers, historians, and the public at large. This attention has pushed the state of the art of judicial architecture and resulted in new buildings designed by prominent architects including Pritzker Prize winning architects, new design guides in the US and abroad, and a growing number of papers, books and literature on this complex building type. Yet, despite the aspirations, good intentions, and a large amount of funds, most, if not all, judicial buildings and especially courthouses remain rooted in a nineteenth century architectural discourse and do not reflect the profound and evolving reciprocal implications of law and architecture today.  

The Shaping Justice studio aims to collectively promote a new theory on courthouse design that foregrounds spatial considerations in section and takes on the issues of boundary, access and arrangement in three distinct scales within the courthouse building form.

The first module focuses on the design of the modular core of the courthouse, the courtroom unit itself, and its potential for modular deployment to produce the core of the courthouse – that is, the assembly of all the courtrooms and their adjoined spaces.  

The second study focuses on the testing of the typological/morphological theory designed in the first study within a given site and program. Details about the site and the program are given in separate handouts. The emphasis is given in the generation of design schematics linking the core of the courthouse with envelope studies, site constraints, total program volume, light conditions, accessibility studies, visibility studies, and so forth. One candidate solution will be chosen among the alternatives for further resolution.

The third study will focus on design development and detailed specification of the schematic chosen in the second study and will be comprised by a thorough set of analog and digital models, analytical diagrams as needed, plans, sections, elevations, and axons in various scales.  

Hylography 

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If generally, construction methods are rooted in problems of aggregation, of assembly, and of joinery using conventional ‘units’ of construction, the foundational difference in the construction of concrete is its indexical relationship to those very processes: concrete imprints the marks of formwork-- its registers it, it mirrors it, and it tattoos it-- but its raw state is liquid defying any immediate additive assembly process. Thus, this dialectical relationship between the figuration of concrete form and the corollary configuration of elements that create formwork define the medium at its core.  

The research of the studio will focus on crafting the mold and mostly, on more recent possibilities of mass customization to adapt concrete to circumstances emerging from structural, programmatic, and geographic contingencies. The program of the studio will be subject to design completions or sponsored possibilities, and it will draw from the contextual usage of concrete, the affordability of labor, as well as the possibility of forging broader global connections to digital manufacturing.