STRANGE PROCEDURES



SIAL Team:
    Paul Minifie
    Yamin Tengono
    Rory Hyde


Communications seminar | General elective

Historically, an important limitation on architecture has been the techniques used to represent buildings. Various histories discuss the invention of perspective, tracing paper, the compass, axonometric projections and so on as accompanying significant shifts in building design.

These techniques often accompany shifts in the theoretical and perceptual ideas we use to evaluate and understand buildings. So it could be argued that concepts like Platonic solids, symmetry, transparency, planarity, the minimal, right angles and repetition acquire their value from the formal logic and ease of their representation. They are so easy to draw that they seem a 'natural' property of the world.




Digital techniques introduce a new set of ways to describe the shape of things. The ability of software to describe the shape of things is determined by the internal methods (algorithms) it uses to define, manipulate and translate formal representations (data structures). As digital methods surpass traditional techniques, they become an important limit condition on what is possible architecturally.


One component of this seminar is to examine these internal techniques at a theoretical level and provide access to them via programming tools. 'Scripting' is writing of simple computer programs to control and automate the workings of other more complex programs. A series of operations can be automated to produce an outcome in response to a series of inputs. CAD software goes from being a simple drafting tool to being an engine for realising design ideas.

So a key question underlying this seminar is to what extent these techniques change the way in which architecture can make sense to us.

Technically the seminar will teach the essentials of programming using visual basic scripting. Visual Basic is becoming the defacto standard for scripting a wide variety of cad packages including autocad, microstation and rhino, and offers an easy way of 'gluing' these packages together with other applications such as Excel.

The seminar will be structured to provide students with a general background in basic programming concepts before allowing them to develop individual projects.