Architecture Design Studio:

A I R

NGAI Sum Ming Sam 395090 Semester 1, 2013 Studio 15

Self Introduction:

Module 4 - Reflect and Report

NGAI Sum Ming

385090

2011 Semester 1

Group 19

1

Hi, I’m Sam. I’m in my third year of Architectural studies and I am excited about this! My past experience with digital design was the Virtual Design during my first year, and I also had a chance to work with the Estate Of-fice in Baptist University of Hong Kong, which I did a bit of AutoCad and Google Sketchup there. GrassHopper is totally a new thing to me but I’m very interested in it, I like how you can create randomly generated ‘populate command’ a grid of crosses and use Vanoroi with a Slider to explore different design opportunity outcomes. I hope I can find myself more comfortbale with digital design, and create more new design pos-sibilities throughout this semester.

Architecture As Discourse:

Architecture as discourse reflecting architecture’s aesthetic val-ues. I think the architecture’s aesthetic values has always been changing, evolving. But since digital design was become popular, the aesthic values as been changed quite vigourously and also, revolutionary. In this journal I want to specificly talks about the skin and the structure of modern digital designed architecture. Let’s look at the new Swanston Square between Swanston Street and Queensberry Street. Look at the plaza entrance, big glass canopy with the support of some steel structure. I find this structure a great resemblence as my Voronoi model I did in GrassHopper where structure and skin meets together to create a sense of organic feel to the architecture. And I think this is one of the trend that modern architecture going towards, is skin as a structure.

About Innovations:

This week I’m going to make an arguement about innovations. And after going through the readings of week 2, I would like to talk about the rela-tionships, between innovations and digital computer technologies. Nowadays, when I look into Dezeen, Architizer and other architecture websites, it is easy to distinguish some buildings with complex geometry and those fancy facade as ‘computer designed architecture’. Many of my non-architecture major friends will refer the RMIT Swanston Academic Building as a building that designed by a computer. And this is where I am about to start my arguement. According to the reading - Architectures New Mdeia, design is to dealt with multiple issues that may contrdicts and most likely conflicting. Archi-tects will always need to have tradeoffs and try on different solutions in order to seek for a better design possibilities. And ‘Computational design-ing software’ like Rhino, in my opinion is just a helping hand for architects to reach those design outcomes that maybe very hard to reach without computer aid design software, but not entirely impossible. I think a promi-nent example would be Frank Gehry’s work the Guggenheim Museum Bibao. This building was built in 1997 were computer technology is not as advance. So many of the works like fabrication and maybe the de-sign process are done without a computer. This shows the design and the ideas of these ‘computer designed architecture’ are come from the architects, not from the computers they are using. Also from the reading, Kalay says computer is analytical machines, creativity does not come from a computers, it is from human who control them. Another interesting point about using digital design technologies is the chance to have self realisation about your design. Sometimes people forget there are communications within human and computers and som-estimes your command towards the computer would reflect upon you to make you realise, and improve your design. Fianllly, I think it is also very important to set goals and clearly analyze the problems before using computer design software. Because it is very easy to get lost with your design without a clear, specific mind to the design.

Week 3 Progress:

This week I explore on the Curve Menu. I am falling behind and I will catch up during this weekend because I was busying on Construction Design submission. Looking forward to show you my upcoming progress. Nevertheless, this week I explore on offset, planar demands.that anables me to create plane on curves and quickly offset a vast amounts of curves. Also, I learnt about the divide command and arc command, that creates arcs between two curves which is really cool because it looks like some canopy structure which i think I will elaborate a bit more later this weekend and hope to evolve it into something more interesting.