Software of the year

My pick for Software of the Year is something I don’t use very much, you probably don’t either, but it hints at what we might use in the future. It is ShapeSmith by Benjamin Nortier.

ShapeSmith can be described with all the popular buzz words: AJAX, NoSQL, three.js, open-source (on top OpenCascade), Amazon Elastic Cloud Storage and HTML5 / WebGL. In this list, the last three items are the significant jargon:

• OpenSource: There are ranges of openness, from open API’s and open data formats through to complete open-source (like in ShapeSmith). Either way, all this access is making it increasingly easy for small development teams to create software only large corporations could have made a decade ago. With it comes innovation. The all encompassing software silos are slowly giving way to ecosystems of software, built in many small parts like ShapeSmith.
• Cloud Computing: Cloud computing was the fabled solution to every problem this year: too complicated to compute, put it in the could; need access anywhere, in the cloud; teamwork, the cloud; global warming, clouds. Yet all the talk resulted in little more than hopeful diagrams. This is because ‘the cloud’ is far more ephemeral than people realise. Yet ShapeSmith actually operates in a cloud. There are difficulties with latency, with paying for the cloud computation and with control. But having a rack of Amazon computers crunch your geometry is a tantalising trade off.
• WebGl: I wrote a post about WebGl back in May. A bit like tablets, it is a solution seeking a problem. ShapeSmith is probably is not the right problem – in the sort term WebGl will likely augment rather than replace your CAD software. But like so much of ShapeSmith, I would not be surprised if it has predicted the future.

Quote of the year

One of the most revealing quotes this year came from Daniel Piker in the Kangaroo Physics release notes:

note : regarding the planarization functions – I have been asked to draw your attention to the patents held by Evolute, Helmut Pottmann and RFR:
http://www.evolute.at/technology/patents.html

In the debate that followed the majority felt Evolute was unethical, and Evolute responded essentially by telling the architectural community to pay up.

However my favourite quote this year has to be:

… use computation, but stop fucking talking about it. Your project isn’t any better because you told me it was scripted from the secret code found in the lost book of the Bible handed to you by your Merovingian great grandmother. Nor because you spent a semester producing the most intricate parametric network ever seen by man, & still ended up with three crumpled potatoes in glossy grey.

Mark Gage eloquently explains the value of computation in his essay “Project Mayhem” for Fulcrum, Issue 18, June 2011. Incidentally the winner of last year’s quote of the year, Schumacher, responded to Gage in the subsequent issue of Fulcrum.

Project of the year

Somehow Gramazio & Kohler and Prof. Raffaello D’Andrea herded a swarm of flying robots to intelligently stack bricks. The installation is an outcome from the Flying Machine Enabled Construction project, which conjures up images of bees and Archigram and R2-D2. It is a great counterpoint to the relatively trivial and unimaginative applications of computation we have seen recently. Hopefully this level of thinking occurs more in the future, or at the very least more flying robots in the future please…

Search of the year

Periodically I check the search terms people use to discover this blog. It’s one way to find questions needing answers. So to the 41 people who came this year asking “what software does zaha hadid use?” the answer is: everything. For the five that wonder why “computational architectural design sucks”, you need to remember computational design is a technique and the outcome is a reflection of your own abilities. But for the three of you who came in search of “patrick schumachers wife”, and you know who you are, I hope you put some thought into your resolutions this new year. To the rest of you, I hope you have an enjoyable break!

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Nominate your ‘of the year’ in the comments.

Yeti is now available for download from yeti3d.com. It is still a proof-of-concept more than a parametric modelling environment, but there is enough going on that others may find it useful – particularly for setting the underlying geometry of models.

The latest version allows the generation of custom objects (shown in the video above). The geometry remains really limited – points, straight lines and circles – until I sort out how arrays of data will work.

Yeti is written in C# and I made the source available at bitbucket in case anyone is curious about how it goes together or wants to make it better.

The rise of the amateur

By and large, most of the interesting stuff presented at Smart Geometry was done, not by people in architecture offices, not by people in academic institutions, but by people in their spare time – Kangaroo, Karamba, Open Cascade, along with others. This fits with a more general trend in the digital space, where everything is becoming cheaper and as a result  it is cheaper to fail while success is virally transmitted.

It is kind of funny that the architecture industry, with all of its enormity, money and importance, is being pushed forward by a very small group of amatures noodling around in their spare time, for nothing other than the love of making something. It is how I imagine physics to be done in the 17th century, everyone just having a go in their spare time and reporting back to the Royal Society that they know how gravity works. Academic institutions should find this very troubling. It is probably the subject of another blog-post, but I think these early Smart Geometry amateurs are indicative that the academic institutions are struggling to find relevancy in this field. The institutional bureaucracy of most universities is well equipped to slowly turn out papers on Deleuze  but ill-equipped to produce, and measure the value of, the type of inovation that is happening today. There are parallels between the academic industry and the recording industry. Perhaps, like in music, we are going to see more of these amateurs (or independent researches) who like independent artists, will survive by touring (consulting and tutoring) and selling their ideas directly to the end user, cutting the institution out of the deal.

GH vs GC

Walking around Smart Geometry it was very obvious what everyone was using:

1. Grasshopper
2. Processing
3. Facebook

Generative Components would sit somewhere near the bottom of that list, behind Digital Project. It must have been a little disheartening for the developers of Generative Components, to have paid all this money for a conference and to see everyone voluntarily using a rivals product. It almost felt rude, like everyone had shown up to a party and drank the host’s beer without talking to them. Conspicuously absent from this party, probably by design, was anyone from Autodesk or McNeel. I was surprised by how distinct the preference for Grasshopper and Processing was, especially considering that both products have some pretty reasonable alternatives, and that their dominance is only a recent phenomena. For both Grasshopper and Processing, it seems to be the community of developers (the amateurs) extending the product that is making it useful. The irony is that neither Grasshopper nor Processing seem to do much to elicit this community support, while Generative Components, who is quite active in the community, has failed to capture it in any meaningful way.

Having said that, Bentley demoed the new version of Generative Components, and thankfully they seem to be trying to innovate their way out of the current predicament. It is not too clear in the image, but in the new version you can define the input and output parameters of a node from a dropdown list. So rather than having a huge list of different node types (a line from points, and line from vector ect.) you have one node type (a line) and then specify how that node is to be constructed and what data you want back from it. Not earth shattering, but these small progressions in GH and GC, along with the gradual redefinition of a researcher is enough to get a room full of 150 geeks excited, and hopefully push everyone forward.

An early sneak peak at a project I have been working on: live parametric programming for Rhino. As you edit the script, in real time, the geometry is created and modified. There is slightly more going on behind the scenes than just phrasing the text and turning it into geometry, because it is based on the Yaml language (hence Yeti), which allows references between objects. So you can name an object with a ‘&’ and refer to it with a ‘*’, effectively establishing a parametric relationship between the objects. It is still in the early stages, but the parametric engine is there, as is most of the phrasing stuff, so hopefully I can push out a demo / the source in the near future.

Responsive Accoustic Surfaces, Smart Geometry 2011

Phil Ayres (CITA)
Mark Burry (SIAL)
Jane Burry (SIAL)
Daniel Davis (SIAL)
John Klein (Zaha Hadid)
Alexander Pena (SIAL)
Brady Peters (CITA)
Robin Bentley (Assael Architecture)
Giovanni Betti (Fosters)
Ben Coorey (UTS)
Thomas Hay
Adam Laskowitz (SUNY)
Ralf Lindemann (Ian Simpson Architects)
Eric Turkiemicz
Kathy Yuen (SUNY)

Dermoid

I have been working on Dermoid for almost a year along with almost a dozen other people, lead by Mark Burry, Mette Thomsen and Martin Tamke. This early post on dynamic relaxation details how we achieved the point distribution – although we later replicated the function in the Maya Nucleus engine. And then in a pretty down moment (after preparing the project for an upcoming publication) I wrote a post on how I suck at parametric design. Well luckily those issues were sorted out, along with how to control the bend of timber and ensure the reciprocal frame stays standing. Dermoid is on display at CITA until the 10th of April as part of the 1:1 exhibition.

Smart Geometry

We have been documenting our progress on this blog, in preparation for the workshop on the responsive acoustic surfacing at Smart Geometry. Needless to say it has involved many late nights pouring plaster to perfect the generating hyperboloids:

It is one thing to make these on the computer, but in real life it takes a day to make the mold and an hour to make a copy and iterating is slow progress – but we are getting there. Hopefully we can organise them into a wall/dome that looks a bit like this:

The upside to not posting is that I have a huge list of topics squirreled away, ready for April when I will have finally said goodbye to Copenhagen.

Over the new year, the workshops clusters at Smart Geometry 2011 were announced. This year it is being held in Copenhagen (28th-31st of March) at the Center for Information Technology and Architecture – part of the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. The theme is Building the Invisible, and somehow I was selected to lead one of the clusters. The worst part about being selected is that I can not attend the other clusters, and this year there are two in particular that I think are shaping up to be very interesting:

1. Using the force

The first is Using the Force, with Daniel Piker and Robert Cervellione. Daniel Piker may be familiar to you because he invented Kangaroo Physics (a new version of Kangaroo is in beta along with the manual, and  a version for GC). For anyone who, like me, has a fascination with how Kangaroo works, no doubt learning it straight from the developer will be a pretty awesome experience. The project is going to be based around using cameras and sensors to control the simulations.

2. Interacting with the city

The second is Interacting with the City, with Przemek Jaworski and Flora Salim. Flora hangs out in SIAL with us, and she was involved in one of the more interesting workshops of SG2010: Parametrics and Physical Interactions. The 7 projects from the last year can be viewed online (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7). My favorite is number 5, Tweet Form, which allows you to change the form of an object with a tweet. The video above is from last year as well. This year they look to be doing a similar thing, except they will be pulling in external API’s and making use of the Microsoft Kinect.

Responsive Acoustic Surfacing

Our cluster is titled Responsive Acoustic Surfacing, and I am taking it along with Mark Burry, Jane Burry and Alexander Peña de Leon. We have a CNC hot wire like the one in the video above (only smaller). It cuts ruled surfaces so rather than making fluted columns, like the video above, we are going to make ruled shapes like Gaudí did (Mark Burry is the executive architect on the Sagrada Família). These shapes will be connected to acoustic data and we are hoping they will enable us to enhance and reduce certain frequencies of sound. Well a lot of work to go on that yet.

Check back here in April for a full report of what happened in SG2011, or come join us by registering for Smart Geometry 2011 here (you need to log into their site first)

You can see all 10 clusters here

I try to solve almost any problem with a Genetic Algorithm. And when you have a hammer as big as a Genetic Algorithm, with almost 3.7 billion years of user testing, it is hard not to see many Genetic Algorithm nails sticking out all over the place. On any other year I would have given this to the Genetic Algorithm, but 2010 has really been the year of the Spring Algorithm. There have been some fascinating projects: Kangaroo physics (above), Ander’s work with the Maya Nucleus Engine, projects by Supermanouver and Kokkugia, and even I dropped the genetic algorithm and picked up the spring algorithm for a while. Also all those tensegrity projects you have seen everywhere this year: spring algorithm.

What I particularly like about the spring algorithm is that it is our algorithm. Most of the other algorithms are hand-me-downs from computer science, in a list that contains all my old favorites: Cellular Automata, Genetic Algorithms, Simulated Annealing, L-systems and Shape Grammars. But there is something inherently spatial about the spring algorithm that makes it useless for anything other than physical stuff, and I like that.

Software of the year

Draftsight almost won this by completely pissing on Autodesk’s release of Autocad for OSX, by launching an almost identical product, weeks earlier, for thousands of dollars less (free). Not only that, Draftsight actually works. While Draftsight certainly had the biggest bang this year, Grasshopper has spent the year slowly cranking out significant features. It started with the new plugin system, which has grown into a sizable array of tools, including: Kangaroo, Rabbit, and Weaver Bird. Add onto that the release of Galapagos for Genetic Algorithms, and the re-release of clusters, 2010 has been Grasshoppers year.

Walk into any university final year exhibition and you are certain to find a Grasshopper definition lurking in more than one of the panels. I spoke to some Autodesk developers this year and you could tell that Rhino and Grasshopper – despite their small market share – had really fired Autodesk up. Autodesk desperately wants to be cool again. In the long run they might be because Grasshopper seems to have taken the concept of graph based parametric modelling almost to its conclusion. I think the next major development in computational architecture will not be a more refined version of Grasshopper, but an entirely new take on it. Autodesk, having acquired Robert Aish, have quietly been working on some physics based modellers and the new Designscript project. And as we saw with Autoplan, it wouldn’t be the first time Autodesk have come from behind to conquer a market, that is if Draftsite/Dassault don’t get there first.

Call of the year

How about you? Do you have convictions about what constitutes a meaningful for contemporary architecture? Or are you unsure? (Do whatever we feel like??? What then? Or what people want??? What do they want?) Do you have the opportunity to work according to your own convictions – if you have convictions? Are you able and willing to state the principles that underly your work? Could these just be valid for you? Who is Daniel Morales to have principles all for himself? Which client should by into Daniel Morales’ personal perspective???

18th of May, Schumacher decides the best defense of parametricism is to go on the offensive against Daniel Morales. With comments like this, rightly or wrongly, 2010 was the year of parametricism.

Project of the year

10 Sukkah City by Marc Fornes at The Very Many.

Fornes has been producing projects in this vein for years, and in 2010 it seems everyone caught on making their own large-scale-installation-of-mass-customised-lazer-cut-pieces-distributed-on-irrational-surfaces.

I like 10 Sukkah City because it is beautiful. I like it because the surface is mathematically interesting, and difficult to panel around the holes. But I mostly like 10 Sukkah city because it collapsed. 10 Sukkah City represents where computational architecture is today: we can make beautiful structures, we can design with fancy and complex mathematics using computation, but we are struggling to deploy them at building scale, we are struggling to embed function, and we have no idea how to calculate the structural load. These problems are masked in a large-scale installation (whereas they are not on a building), the collapse of 10 Sukkah City pulled back that mask a little bit and gave an honest insight into where we stand at the end of 2010.

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Please nominate your ‘of the year’ in the comments. I hope you all have an enjoyable new year. I  am taking a short break back to New Zealand but will be back here shortly.

I have spent the past month revising this project, and have come to the conclusion: I suck at parametric design. I set off with intentions of making the entire model parametric, but four weeks later I am left with a shambolic set of simi-parametric tools linked together with long manual processes and discarded ambition for the complex parts of the project.

Everything that I wanted to do with a parametric model could be achieved with a parametric model; this claim is the origin of the rhetoric for the flexibility of parametric models. In practice however, I did very little of the project with a parametric model, I did a bit of the project manually and I modified the the rest of the project so it was achievable. The result is a design that is distorted towards the strengths and away from the weaknesses of parametric tools. An example of this is the curves along the surface (illustrated below). The the curves are an explicit list of points that are wrapped onto the surface with a UV curve passed between them. Most of the time this curve looks straight, but at the ends of the surface (shown in the illustration in red) the UV curve starts to bend. The solution is to use a geodesic curve (the green one), but this breaks the relationships to the other curves. Given enough time, it would be possible to use straight geodesic curves but, given how long it would take, it is far easier to use UV curves and modify the design to allow the bend of the curve.

Bent UV curve shown in red, straight geodesic shown in green

It is a trade off: will the 12 hours I spend fixing the parametric model be noticeable in the final design.  And in some cases: is it faster to get the parametric model to conform to the real world, or is it faster to get the real world to conform to the parametric model. People mistakenly associate this decision with choice and blame the architect for being a luddite. But the decision is loaded and biases the design towards things that are easy to do parametrically and away from things that are hard to do parametrically. In this way, just like any other CAD tool, parametric designs can be read as being in the language of parametricisim –  dare I quote Schumacher – biased towards the easy solutions.

So parametric flexibility is more than being able to do something, it is the ability to actually do it. For me, what I am able to do and what I actually do is quite different. I suspect the difficulty in doing some of these tasks is related using mathematics as the intermediate language between designer and parametric tool, but that is a topic for another post. Have you encountered a similar phenomena in your models?

New materialism

During a question and answer session, Mark Burry pointed out that materials are back in the zeitgeist. I suspect this is probably because materials and construction techniques are rapidly being discovered by material scientists, giving architects a much broader range of materials to consider than steel, concrete and glass. To a lesser extent architects are also starting to drive the development of new materials (although this is still rare). This is unfamiliar territory for architects and much of the research is looking at how to bring the material scientist into the project team and how to design and compute with these new materials.

My favorite example is a project by Sarat Babu from the Bartlett called Microkinetics. In the video above he has printed two types of rubber to make a member. In the first half of the video all the rubber is in strands and it behaves as you would expect: as it stretches it also becomes thinner. In the second half of the video, the rubber is printed in a bow-tie shape. As the member stretches it also becomes thicker. Babu had other examples of this process being used to make things like a cylindrical rubber jug, which when picked up forms a spout. Unfortunately, I suspect due to commercial interest in his work, all the videos of this have been taken down.

The mash-up

Software mash-up was a more subtle trend at the symposium.  The keywords were: “I linked software X with software Y.” This falls into a much larger trend in software engineering of script kiddies, web2.0, SDK’s and the App store. For architecture there are probably two major implications:

• The first is that it is the end of CAD-as-god, or the belief that a single tool can solve all problems. Hopefully this is also the end of all the zealots who flood forums with stories about how Autocad or Revit or Archicad are better than Autocad or Revit or Archicad. Possibly it is also the end of employment for people who can only use Autocad or Revit or Archicad.
• The second is that interoperability becomes a lot more important than ability. I know there are people like Arup, and I imagine other big offices, are looking at this problem, but I am not convinced that it will be solved in a top-down manner.

In the mash-up culture we are also seeing software offices shrink to the size of one person. A single person like Daniel Piker (who makes Kangaroo physics for Grasshopper) is able focus on solving one problem well, rather than building an entire CAD package. I hope that the App Store model extends to architecture, allowing a single person to make a living solving a niche problem exceptionally well,  and giving us a mash-up of many well fitting solutions to a problem rather than one ill-fitting CAD package.