Adams Pendant

At Radlab we recently completed a light pendant, and for both the process of generating design possibilities, and for solving issues of fabrication, vbscript for Rhino helped enormously. I've included some process images and photographs that we didn't post to the website.

Custom designed for a private residence in Southern California, the twin lanterns serve as hanging center pieces for the main gathering space. Given the height at which they were to be positioned and the space they were intended to illuminate, the goal of the design was to elicit a continuous fluidity of light and motion around each pendant. By developing an algorithm that referenced a volume, an external 'point' of view, and an array of surface control vertices, a textured volume of non-repetitive sections was achieved. A selection of unique isoparametric curves that undulate in both latitude and longitude were then sampled to produce the resultant form.

New Workshop

I'm going to be teaching a new workshop in Rhinoscripting geared towards architects in Portland with Kenfield Griffith.

I'll be updating the workshop progress and outcome here. Kenfield is currently setting up a class site with all the materials, most will probably be very familiar to anyone who's taken a workshop with us.

Radlabinc.com is live

We have at last launched the website for Radlab, Inc. There are still a few projects that we need to upload and texts we are going to revise/rewrite, but for the most part it's there. Garett Hwang and I designed the site, and Themba Nyathi did all of the programming. Needless to say, we're very glad to have it up and running. Let us know if you need a hand with any rhinoscripting projects. If you check out the website at radlabinc.com, I would very much appreciate your opinions and observations. Oh, and Radlab is moving! Our new address is 25 Drydock Ave, Boston, MA 02210, and the official move in date is Feb. 1, 2009. Merry Christmas!

L-Systems

This has been a Rhino week.

On Wednesday, I met with David Rutten, who's just as brilliant as you might expect from his work. He's an architect turned programmer (ahem), but he's one those cases where he's actually a very very good programmer. He showed me a beta version of Grasshopper, formerly called the Explicit History Plugin, which is a visual programming language (using boxes and arrows-- much like Yahoo pipes) for parametrics in Rhino.



Then my former teacher and mentor, Meejin Yoon, asked me to put together some scripts and images of my old work for her tenure packet. The script required some man-handling to get working. It's quite ugly, but here it is if you want it.

I was thinking it might be cool to remake these L-Systems in Grasshopper. If you do it, send me a link!

Anyway, here are the pretty pictures.


















More pics here.

RhinoScript 101

This has been out for a few months, but anyone who's learning RhinoScript should check out David Rutten's RhinoScript 101. It's a great resource and gets you up to speed on scripting in v4.

Post Scripting Questions Here

A few students have asked me script related questions after the workshop. This is a special post (thread) for some of those questions.

The Final Presentations

The students worked very hard over the six days of the workshop to both learn Rhinoscripting and design something intelligent and meaningful. Although these are still works-in-progress, they've succeeded in the types of provocations that are the hallmark of good design. Congratulations!
~John Snavely

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Here are the projects in no particular order:

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GROUP I
TEAM: Sergio Araya, Duks Koshitz, Garrett Hwang, Yuchen Liu
Danzer Variations

This project attempted to design a Rhinoscript algorithm for generating Danzer tiles. Using an iterative search and sort approach, the team assembled various tile arrangements.









DOWNLOADS: FULL PRESENTATION (PDF) | SCRIPT (RVB)

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GROUP II
TEAM: Lin Yang, Aydin Oztoprak, Masoud Akbarzadeh, Ayodh Vasant Kamath, Gabriel Cira
Expandable Tessellation

The second group designed a 3D solid/structure composed of expandable surfaces. The strategy was to build a unit surface which transforms into a larger one under controlled forces.






DOWNLOADS: FULL PRESENTATION (PDF) | SCRIPT (RVB)

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GROUP III
TEAM: Leslie Lok, Alyssa Wright, Sonia Klemperer-Johnson
Performance Glassware

This project sought to re-conceptualize a drinking glass as a mass rather than a single surface. Once thought of as a mass with a gradient of permeability, the glass can have new performance qualities of cooling, straining, and liquid mixing.






DOWNLOADS: FULL PRESENTATION (PDF) | SCRIPT I (RVB) | SCRIPT II (RVB)