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MSc AAC

Adaptive Space

A summary of recent posts by students and staff from the MSc Adaptive Architecture & Computation course.

Thursday 02 August 2007

Depthmap 7.08.02r released

Posted by Alasdair Turner at 17h35

Friday 20 July 2007

Topomet version 3

Posted by Alasdair Turner at 15h29

Monday 26 February 2007

Boids

Image: Yet another comic strip... :) (ok, ok, I'll start uploading serious stuff next time!)

Posted by Ralfos at 17h11

Saturday 10 February 2007

Emerging Phenomena

Image:

A comic strip that I made, related to the course... :)

Posted by Ralfos at 14h24

Real Time Maps?

A little jolt to the old memory cells and with the help of google I managed to find some stuff on real time mapping. I saw this stuff a while back but forgot about it. So I looked it up as I thought it might be good to share. Cab Spotting is a live map of the taxis journeys in the bay area of San Francisco. Mobile landscape is a project by MIT, the project looked at ways to map, in real time, the use of mobile phones. I thought that the links might be good to look at as they have nice visualisation derived from data analysed captured as it happens.

Posted by Weblog for Abdul at 02h04

Wednesday 07 February 2007

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Posted by y-s at 15h11

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Posted by anonymous at 15h00

Monday 05 February 2007

Any Ideas?

A while back Steven Johnson produced a best seller where he suggests that sharing information makes us more intelligent. So here I am contributing to the shared, links, thoughts, perceptions, images etc from the contributors of this blog.

I thought that it was interesting both Charles Walker (Advanced Geometry Unit, Arups) and John Jordan (Reclaim the Streets) point to the notion of serendipity as a way to generate ideas. I guess in the real world it’s called serendipity and in education it’s called research. Either way the journey is a fascinating one for me and so many thanks to those people who are marking the route.

The Centre of Advanced Spatial Analysis is a real find for me. There is lots of information there on research projects and research activity that the centre is engaged in. I am going to have a go at creating one of the immersive panoramas, it is a cool tool.

I couldn’t stay for all of Ben Croxford’s seminar so some of you might have already seen this and if you haven’t check it out 3D Map of London Air Pollution.

Posted by Weblog for Abdul at 01h54

Sunday 04 February 2007

just some interesting stuff I came across...

"Visual Aesthetic Evolutionary Design Links" website hosts a good ammount of links on evolutionary design. It led me to Karl Sim's webpage who was discussed during last Friday's Generative Space session and to Peter Bentley's web page, who will be giving us a lecture this coming Friday on the same module...

Jon Bird is conducting some interesting research at the Department of Informatics at the University of Sussex on AI and cognitive science. He presented two papers at the GA 2006 conference we attended at Milan during December. One was about "lessons from collaboratively building a generative artwork" (with Dustin Stokes) and the other one about "homeostasis". For the latter topic he maintains a very informative webpage which also hosts an applet that illustrates homeostatic behaviour and was developed using Processing.

CECA (Centre for Evolutionary Computing in Architecture) is a research group at the School of Architecture at the University of East London. These guys run an MSc programme with a research field similar to ours and a focus on algorithmical approaches towards architectural design. A lot of interesting material is on their wiki page: projects, papers, tutorials. Some of the people involved in CECA (Finucane, Derix, Coates) were also presenting their work at the GA 2006 conference as well.

Notes on Boids: If you're doing anything relating to swarms, schools, flocks, herds or packs, then maybe it's a good idea to make a bookmark of Craig Reynold's website. Also check out his Steering Behaviors For Autonomous Characters page.

Morfogen: Blog on generative design.

Robotecture: Interactive Architecture: lots of stuff

Posted by tassos at 22h12

Friday 02 February 2007

Tensegrity - Geodesy - Polyhedra - "Springs"

Image:

I recently developed an interest in space-frame lattice structures and began a bit of a research on the web. One thing led to another and I started looking into the fields listed in the title, which are more or less interrelated... This entry is sort of a mapping of the places I visited, just in case anyone else is interested.

"Tensegrity" (tensional integrity) is a term coined by Buckminster Fuller to describe a structural property of certain shapes that allows them to maintain their geometric characteristics through an internal tensional behaviour of the system when it is under stress. (source: http://www.tensegrity.com/)

By investigating this property, Fuller developed the design of geodesic structures and domes, on which the dome of the Eden Project designed by Grimshaw Architects was based.

French architect David Georges Emmerich also investigated similar structures at the same time with Fuller (50's), but independantly. He called them "structures tendues et autotendantes" (prestressed tensile structures). It is also said that even earlier (1920's) the Russian Constructivists were the first to explore such structural properties. (source: http://www.intergate.com/~bobwb/ts/tenseg/book/chap1.html)

Many physical structures found in nature possess "tensegral" properties (radiolaria). It also seems that modelling and simulating such tensegrity structures through programming and more specifically through "spring-structures" can yield interesting results. This is the basis on which I am posting this entry, as I find a potential in exploring this theme through our course...

This is just a list of what I came across, certainly not all that's there... hope u find sth of interest...

Tensegrity:

And some links on Springs and Spring-applets:

  • http://www.sodaplay.com/constructor/index.htm - Probably the most famous one and one of the oldest. Soda is based in London and in fact one of these guys (Ed Burton) is giving a lecture at the Architectural Association on Feb 14th (unfortunately, we'll probably be at Bath at the time). With Soda Contructor you can make tensegrity creatures and test their behaviour under forces. Also check out the articles about Soda on Generator.x

Other spring structure applets can also be found at:

And finally, following Sean's very precise lead on John Frazer (whose work on tensegrity structures I ignored), this is the link to Frazer's book "An evolutionary architecture". As the name suggests, the book is mainly (but not only as it appears) about an evolutionary approach towards design. In fact, it is probably one of the earliest (if not the earliest) such approach regarding architecture.

Posted by tassos at 22h22

Adaptive Space replaces the Computing for Emergent Architecture weblog.

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