Cultural Whiplash in Vegas
Outside my hotel room in Vegas.
I probably should not have been reading Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk on my flight down to Las Vegas last night. It made the surreality here all the more so. On top of that, I’m experiencing a cultural whiplash. Having just returned a month ago from the annual ACADIA conference in Banff with a 150 of my best academic friends, I am now attending Autodesk University with my favorite 8000+ fellow developers and users. Each experience is great in its own way. I personally prefer visiting Banff, but as I stand here in the glitter, noise and techno of these modern monsters on the Vegas strip, I do have to ask myself whether it’s actually any “better” or “greener” that the Canadian Pacific built the Chateau Lake Louise in the middle of a precious wilderness. It’s hard to imagine all 8000 of us at Lake Louise. But I do hope that in another 100 years, the Chateau will still stand while the fake Venice I now sit in will be long gone.
Chateau Lake Louise in Banff, Albert, Canada
Lunchtime at Autodesk University
Announcing Heliotrope; Solar Calculations for Grasshopper
Did I mention that I obsess about where the sun is?
So much so, that I developed a tool for use in my own modeling which I am now happy to release for general use. Heliotrope is a solar calculator for creating solar-aware design and geometry in Rhino and Grasshopper.
Typical modeling tools provide the sun’s position only for rendering–set your day, time and location and see the shadows that result. Heliotrope allows designers to use the sun’s location parametrically when creating geometry by calculating solar elevation and azimuth at one or many dates and times. In addition, the precise time and position of sunrise, sunset and solar noon are available on a given date.
Rhino and Grasshopper provide an accessible and powerful modeling environment in which to use Heliotrope to generate paths along solar arcs; align objects to sunrise, solar noon, and sunset; or analyze what objects obscure the sun at given times. For example, the image below shows the sun’s path and position at 10:06am here in Portland, Oregon on this year’s summer solstice, fall equinox, and winter solstice. A designer can adjust the time of day to view precisely where the sun will be located or use the calculations directly to drive parametric geometry.
Please feel free to try out Heliotrope and send me your thoughts and comments. The Version 0.1 plugin and User Guide are available for download from Food4Rhino. This free evaluation copy will expire on 12/21/2011 to make way for a number of additional analysis features now in development.
All in all, I expect to continue obsessing about where the sun is throughout our grey Portland winter!
- Brian -
Aligning the Sun in SketchUp
Adjusting Earth location to create the right shadow alignments
I admit it, I obsess about sun angles. It is my inner mathematician colliding with my inner architect. I love how traditional architectural elevations rendered in the Beau Arts style provided shadows showing the depth and relief of the facade. This image style still works even for modern, low relief buildings as shown in this rendering of Portland’s , 12W building by ZGF.
Direct rendering engines, such as the one built into SketchUp, are great for generating the clean crisp shadows required for these images. But it is difficult find the right dates and times to position the sun at precisely the angles needed to cast the desired shadows. SketchUp does not provide for manipulation of the sun position directly (as can be done in Rhino, kudos to them!). And while you can use date and time sliders to move things around until you get something that looks good, it is difficult to get just right? And once adjusted for one elevation, how do you expose successive faces of the building for the others?
Shadows cast across the face of Portland's 12W building.
I found a solution by using an object called a “shadow box” from an old, used, hand-drafting book by C. Leslie Martin. Martin used this simple cube-shaped ”box” to illustrate where shadows should be drawn, in SketchUp it can be used to dial in exactly the location, date and time required to cast perfect shadows.
First, I got close by ignoring the geolocation and manually my latitude to 45 and longitude to 0 degrees in the “Set Manual Location” window under “Model Info->Geo-location. I then adjusted for solar noon on the equinox in order to align my shadows precisely along the north vector, which defaults to the Y-axis. The magic date and time settings are 9/21/2011 at 11:53AM and set by tweaking the values in the Shadows window. Not perfect but as close as can be gotten with minutes being the minimum time adjustment value.
Initial construction of shadow box showing crosshairs and north angle 0. The orange line along the Y-axis marks north.
Next I rotated north 45 degrees using the Solar North toolbar in SketchUp 8 Pro. Why rotate north angle instead of rotating the model? SketchUp provides preset orthogonal views aligned to the default axis. Assuming your model building has faces constructed orthogonally to those axes as well (a good idea for stable modeling) it is easy to expose each successive face of the building by switching to its view and setting north to the respective 45, 135, 225, and 315 degrees. Rotating your model is hazardous as it can introduce tiny errors in point coordinates that will cause much grief later on.
Final shadow box settings with the crosshairs aligned to the box base corner.
The sun is now 45 degrees off the building face, but we also need to adjust its elevation to get a vertical angle 45 degrees. Don’t touch that time and date! Instead, adjust your longitude under the “Model Info” dialog so that the shadow box “crosshairs” directly align with the lower back corner of the box. The magic latitude was 55.4 degrees N. Now by changing the north angle to each respective quarter and you can quickly export beautifully stylized and consistent elevation studies. Separately exported images for lines, materials and shadows can then be recombined in Adobe Photoshop to further enhance the renderings.
Download your very own SketchUp shadow box here!
ACADIA 2011 Conference & Rhino Programming
I am excited to be attending the ACADIA 2011 annual conference in Calgary & Banff beginning in two weeks! The conference is split between the two locations, the first two days in workshops on the University of Calgary campus and the remainder at the Banff Arts and Cultural Center. The biggest question of the moment is which of the workshops to sign up for during those first two days in Calgary?!
Any audience members who will also be there, please feel free to get in touch with me! Happy to talk shop over a cup of coffee. Will pay for guest blog postings with beer.
Speaking of talking shop, I have quietly extended my capability to develop plugin tools in the Rhino 3d modeling environment and am now ready to flaunt them at large. There are three accessible levels of programming in the new beta version of Rhino 5.0: Grasshopper, Python, and C#, in increasing order of both capability and complexity. All are a great deal of fun and have different strengths and weaknesses. What makes the three together a particularly powerful combination is the ability to develop code at the appropriate level of programming sophistication and then to utilize the results in the others. For example, complex algorithms can be implemented in C# and then expressed as Python commands or Grasshopper objects.
The simplest of the three for programming, the Grasshopper visual language interface, has become a fascinating starting point of a great number of new features and capabilities. An interesting example of outside the box thinking is Andrew Payne’s Firefly plugin for controlling Arduino micro-processors. (I’m looking forward to hearing Andrew’s talk at ACADIA as well.) Grasshopper provides an amazing ability to switch back and forth between the Rhino model and the program, leading to a code development process I like to think of as “Forward-Backward” code development in contrast to traditional “Top-Down” and “Bottom-Up” approaches.
Grasshopper provides a limited set of data structures for passing between program objects, however, basically just lists and lists-of-lists of things. Great for generating lots of objects but tricky for accessing individuals within those lists and costly in terms of storage because it limits the ability to release and garbage collect intermediate objects; all objects created exist throughout the program. Code loops are also tricky to implement although this has been addressed with the clever Hoopsnake plugin. Furthermore, although it is easy to quickly generate programs in visual environments, I often find it frustratingly difficult to go back and understand what I built even a short time later. Developing modular and robust code is tricky, especially in the hands of less experienced programmers.
As a result, after hacking out rough ideas in Grasshopper I tend to move quickly into implementing the complex parts in traditional imperative code. This is where Python and C# come into play. It is possible to embed Python or C# code directly into Grasshopper objects for use within that environment, to write scripts directly in Rhino, or develop in Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2010 Integrated Development Environment with all of its attendant debugging and build support. For my work, this is where the rubber meets the road.
Over the next few weeks I will present here some of my initial experiments and short tutorials to enable others to get started at each of the three levels of programming in Rhino and to understand their strengths and weaknesses. And of course I will be posting from the conference as well. For those of you active in the field there is a nice LinkedIn group for ACADIA and somehow I have also taken on the responsibility for enlisting support at the conference to get its activities posted there. Feel free to join in the conversation there as well.
It is a busy time and even if you can’t come to the conference I hope that you will enjoy the vicarious glimpses here instead! Stay tuned, as there is more to come…!
- Brian -
Breeding Architecture
A few weeks ago I posted about a white paper I’d read from SOM on their experiments with genetic algorithms and design. It lead me to some further investigations into optimization and architecture. Frankly, I have been reluctant to buy into the idea of computer optimization of architecture. There are simply too many competing objectives to be optimized and I like to believe that there is an aesthetic component to the built environment that is important. I say “believe” because I run into plenty of folk who feel the exact opposite: that justifying anything based on the aesthetics of form is a waste of the taxpayer’s money. Too bad for the taxpayer. Others have tried to quantify beauty by identifying specific characteristics that we are drawn to and arguing that the more of these found in a particular object the more beautiful it will seem to be. Good luck with basing your art career on that, much less deriving much satisfaction from the process.
Long Arm by Opah at PicBreeder
Typically, computer optimization uses something called “directed search” and involves defining a space of problem solutions bounded by acceptable solutions and a cost metric that measures a particular solutions “goodness”. Your goal is to find one or more solutions with a minimal cost. Once you have a legal solution your cost function gives you a direction to go in so you just keep moving that way until you run out of legal solutions and that must be your best one. Simple, right? Wrong. Even if you can model the problem accurately and define the right cost function, complex solution spaces are full of “local minima” or solutions that look good from where you are at but if you just went over that hump it turns out there is a better solution
over there. Exploring the solution space efficiently can be very difficult to do. Even so, designing architecture is all about adjusting the objectives or changing the constraints as the problem becomes better understood.
Butterfly by Adeleinr at PicBreeder
In steps a new area of computer optimization and search loosely termed non-directed or human-directed optimization. Ken Stanley, of the University of Central Florida, is championing this technique with some fascinating work in creating imagery and music that is generated in part by a search algorithm and in part by human choices as to what intermediate solutions are interesting or not. The human in the loop “quantifies” the unquantifiable value of aesthetic judgment. At some level the algorithm has an understanding of value but that valuation is based on human input and changes as the search evolves.
One such project Stanley has produced is called “PicBreeder” in which users interact with an evolutionary algorithm to create two dimensional imagery.
Egg Wearing Hat by Robert at PicBreeder
Some rather beautifulexamples of two dimensional imagery in fact. The human is not making the choices of how images in this program should change, they simply reward images created along the way that they find interesting. Setting out with an initial objective or intention as to what you want to produce invariable fails. Stanley claims that this system produces “art” while removing the “artist” from the equation. All I can say is that statement that leads to a whole host of philosophical arguments that my inner artist strongly objects to. But I will say that the images are great, the site is fun to explore, and there appears to be something here that has real potential to enable search in new and complex problem spaces. Maybe even architecture. Check it out!
Congrats NASA!
This morning I listened to the launch of the Space Shuttle Atlantis on NPR, the final space shuttle mission. It brought back a lot of memories for me personally, having started my career nearly 30 years ago as an electrical engineer at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mt View, California. Pictured here, I was tasked with designing and fabricating a small, standalone data recorder device that was ultimately used in shuttle missions, aboard Russian COSMOS rockets, and even in the Antarctic. Checkout that Heathkit VT100 terminal and the bubble memory device it is tied into behind!
I joined NASA shortly after the first shuttle launched in 1981 and just in time for my cousin Jimmy and I to travel to Edwards Air Force Base to see the landing of the 4th shuttle mission in July of ’82. As a NASA employee we got to stay and camp on the facility side of the base, along with plus or minus 20,000 others (and President Regan!). I remember watching the lines of car lights leading down from the hills on the other side of the lake bed where some 100,000 not so lucky visitors came to see.
It was great to be a part of that experience. For 50 years NASA has been a driving force behind high technology and can be credited with a huge number of ideas, devices and technology that are now so ingrained in our daily lives we no longer consider them high-tech. Velcro and Tang being the least of them. We also know from real experience just how dangerous it is to operate such a complex machine in such a hostile environment, and I wish a safe journey to all of the astronauts aboard. I strongly believe in using non-military scientific programs such as NASA to motivate and give positive direction to our creative drive and entrepreneurship, and hope that through it we will continue to seek new opportunities and set new goals that do so in this new, post-Shuttle era.
Mini-Pecha Kucha!
I wanted to change the materiality of this space...
Over the past two terms I have been teaching introductory digital media in the Architecture department at the University of Oregon and for their final presentations this term I asked my 70+ undergrads to step outside the box a little by presenting “mini-Pecha Kuchas”.
For those in the know, Pecha Kuchas have become a popular format for presentations by architects and designers of all sorts. Originating in Tokyo, I first heard of the format when signing up for the Murcutt Program last year when we were asked bring to show our work to the other attendees. Even our quiet little town of Portland, Oregon, now hosts Pecha Kucha nights on a regular basis with terrific presentations and free beer (either of which would qualify them as a great night out).
Opening instructions by Prof Brian
The Pecha Kucha format is 20 slides for 20 seconds each. This forces the presenter to use images that are both worth talking to for 20 seconds and preventing them from dwelling on any one image for too long.
Around the same point in time as the most recent Portland Pecha Kucha night, I was deliberating what to ask my students to do for final presentations. Yet another review of drawings hanging on the wall seemed too dull. And would not have fit well in our assigned lecture hall. Furthermore, past year’s classes had included a group project which I wanted to incorporate as well.
A team working the lecture hall
The result? Mini-Pecha Kuchas! My students formed teams of two and each team was given 8 slides at 15 seconds. Plus a title cover slide at the front and a “Thank You” on the back. They were then asked to present one significant change to their partner’s project, with their partner’s help (these presentations were a week following their final studio reviews and in many cases addressed feedback from those reviews). What changes they could make was left totally open and ranged from removing a wall in order to clean up circulation to relocating the entire project to another city where it fit better into the surrounding context. Each presenter was asked to use two images from the original project and produce two new images explaining their suggested change, and each was required to speak to the change they had made to their partner’s project, not to their own project.
The resulting presentations were a great success. 35 teams presented in an hour and a half without the audience going completely stir crazy. The concise format drove the students to present graphics that precisely explained the change they had chosen to make. Some needed more time to explain than was available in 15 seconds, while changes that were too minor still left a lot of blank time to fill.
And this is what the facade looks like now...
The mini-Kuchas were also a useful tool in a design teaching process as well, with the students both thinking about another student’s work and getting a different look at their own. It made them focus precisely on the one change they felt would be most significant to make in a design project. I particularly enjoyed presentations in which some major change was made to the studio program and felt they exposed fundamental issues and weaknesses that could be explored further inside the original “legal” parameters.
Teaching these past two terms has been a great experience and I have enjoyed being back in the college environment. Happy to say that my experimental mini-Kuchas turned out to be the perfect capstone and I highly recommend the format to other design instructors.
Genetic Architecture: Nature versus Nurture?
Susan at the Hanging Tree
This week’s reading was Architectural Genomics by Keith Besserud of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s Black Box Studio which describes their experiments using genetic algorithms to create building form and the results they achieved in shaping a multi-level tower to optimize sun exposure in the context of shade from the surrounding buildings. Images are available here and in the paper linked to above.
Genetic algorithms use a heuristic search technique to mimic evolution by generating new “species” of objects and killing off the less successful members of each generation. Search heuristics for complex optimization problems are often described in terms of natural processes. Simulated annealing, for example, may be thought of as attempting to “shake” objects on integrated circuits into better and better placements and Ant colony optimization finds optimal connective paths based on the mechanisms ants use to reduce travel to the shortest path between their nest and a food source. Each of the optimization problems addressed by these algorithms are “computationally hard”. So hard that finding an exact solution is not feasible and the heuristics approach the problems by abstracting them, thinking about how the natural world approaches them, and crossing their fingers.
Optimizing architectural design, even ignoring aesthetics, is similarly hard. There are too many parameters to optimize in a design problem and they are difficult to precisely quantify in relation to one another. In thinking about using genetic algorithms on the built environment, however, it strikes me that this may not be the right natural heuristic to invoke. Genetic codes define specie and the details of that specie’s design. Whether you have a giraffe or a horse; the one optimized to forage on ground cover and the other on tree leaves. The closest analogy in the built environment might be the building “type” rather than form. Is this a church or a skyscraper? Certainly something that must be determined and potentially should be optimized within its context. But in these experiments they already knew the type of building they wanted: a tower. The optimization problem was to find the optimal form for that tower within its space and context. A better analogy is that of how a plant grows. The genetic code it starts out with tells it to seek the sun and it creates its form based upon that drive. A plant optimizes itself to its location, its orientation and surrounding environment, but it does not have to decide whether it is a dogwood or a maple. From a single, simple, initial cellular starting point it knows how to create the appropriate sized leaves and branches and flowers and seeds and fit all those things into the right spots.
All of which leads me to speculate that a different optimization heuristic might better apply. Perhaps there is a means of “growing” a building using a preset genetic typology that defines its characteristics and how it will respond to its environment, and then leave its unique individual environment to determine the exact form it takes. The algorithm would be progressive and generate form from the inside, developing in response to the surroundings. It might be necessary to guide the growth by pruning, grafting or forcing branches into desired configurations. Call it the “Bonsai Tree” algorithm.
I don’t know how to do it, but it sure sounds like fun to try.
Potato prints in a modern age…
Bok Choy Flower, Brian Lockyear, 2010
One of the simplest forms of printmaking is the “potato print”, or “d’impression de pommes de terre” for all you francophiles out there. Potato prints are great because they can be successfully executed by anyone, from children to adults. You slice the potato in half, cut a stamp image into the surface (remember to do it in reverse!), and use whatever grungy paint you want as ink to stamp with. Potatoes are cheap, the cutting is easy and doesn’t even require sharp implements. The potato’s starchiness helps by acting as an additional binder in the ink. Don’t go for detail. But if you are feeling both broke and green next holiday season, buy some potatoes, cut up some paper bags, gather the family, and make potato print wrapping paper to your heart’s content.
Given this clandestine love of potatoes and printmaking, imagine the joy I felt this week finding an article on Boing Boing entitled “3D printing with mashed potatoes“! 3D printers normally extrude a curable plastic, but in this story the 3D printer makers at Bits From Bytes are printing “food” using mashed potatoes as their medium. Wonder how often they have to clean the print heads?
These are not the first folks I’ve heard of abusing their 3D printers with unusual print materials. Just last week Virginia San Fratello of Rael San Fratello Architects gave an excellent talk at UO’s White Stag building describing printing using liquid ceramics, concrete, and even simulated blood as mediums. Their organic planter brick walls are quite lovely, check them out. And yes, Virginia did say that their printer jams frequently. Clearly a technique not for the faint of heart. Or equipment risk averse. Or average architecture firm. Yet.
Sustainable Economics
Suomenlinnna Island, Helsinki, Finland
There is a famous Jane Jacobs quote I’ve loved for years, “New ideas need old buildings”. I like it for its aesthetic sense. I personally love the feel an old building imparts and find creative inspiration in the patina of a well used urban environment. There is a character and charm of place acquired through decades of love and attention, and its just not something that you can build new.
Until this week, however, I had not considered the economic context Jacobs was actually speaking to. As explained in Steven Johnson’s new book, “Where Good Ideas Come From,” Jacobs recognized that creative enterprises were simply too strapped financially to be able to afford new, modern spaces. The more functional, cheap, raw spaces an urban environment provides the more opportunities there are for cutting edge, fledgling, innovative enterprises to move in. I particularly like Johnson’s comparison of urban environments to coral reefs. How the the calcified bones of urban structures left behind as their creators move on then provide homes for creative fish to move into.
Some urban fabric in Sydney, Australia
Bioswale adjacent to the historic armory, now the Gerding Theater, Portland, Oregon
This coming Monday, January 31st, The Natural Step Network of Oregon will host the premier of a new film, “The Greenest Building,” discussing the economics of “reuse and recycle” in terms of the built environment. (Preview video clip/Buy Tickets) The film will be shown at the Gerding Theater, particularly fitting as Portland’s first registered historic landmark and the first theater anywhere to achieve LEED Platinum. While the architecture industry has been discussing “embodied energy” for some time now in the context of sustainable construction practices and Edward Mazria’s 2030 Challenge, new work such as this film expand the concept to include “economic embodied energy” as well. It brings Jacobs’s economic thinking back to the forefront as well and shows how renovation and reuse can achieve economic, social, and ecological balance as well.
A hill town street in Macerata, Italy.
Another such thinker, Donovan Rypkema of PlaceEconomics, addressed a similar issue in his speech on “Economics, Sustainability, and Historic Preservation” at the National Trust Annual Conference in 2005. In it, Rypkema described “social embodied energy”, in which buildings create a social environment that is changed or destroyed when replaced or razed. Maintaining an existing structure maintains and stabilizes its surrounding urban context as well. Renovating an existing building often utilizes local materials and labor to a much greater extent than new construction does, which is a fundamental goal of LEED and Living Building Challenge metrics. An excellent example of the devastation caused by “urban renewal” is currently shown in the “Re-building South Portland” exhibit at the Architectural Heritage Center.
Abandoned warehouse, Donald, Oregon
Steven Johnson explains how the World Wide Web has built upon layers of creative platforms. That spending time and energy reinventing the wheel doesn’t get you a Ferrari. A coral reef’s success is built on the generations of reef builders that came before. The same thinking applies to the built environment as well. We don’t have the time, energy, or resources to continue tearing existing buildings down, hauling materials around and replacing them with new ones only to tear those up in another 20 years. Our post-industrial world must learn to build structures well the first time, maintain what we have built, and renovate or restore them before they reach a state in which they must be replaced. Of course it will not always be possible or appropriate to preserve the past intact, nor should it be. But thinking of growth in terms of building on the past instead of replacing it will take us a long way down the road towards creating the beautiful, historic urban fabrics we Americans spend so much of our time traveling elsewhere to see. Perhaps that will help us spend our dollars locally as well!
