Mesh will be calling the Fields Institute home for the immediate future! With hundreds of world class mathematicians visiting, researching, lecturing, or just chatting at this great (and great looking) institution, I could hardly ask for a more appropriate office location.
Filed under Launch, Mesh Consultants
I’m pretty excited about my new project:
Getting everything together for the launch has been a bit crazy, but we’re off!
The idea is this:
Mesh is a technical consulting firm that offers a spectrum of services that stimulate conceptual development, rationalize complex design, and effectively implement high level research in the digital design industry.
Our four core services groups are: Geometry Consulting, Custom Algorithm Design, Research and Development, and Simulation.
These services have been specifically geared to architects, engineers, manufacturers, artists, and game developers looking to develop new or existing technologies that will add value to their services and products.
Filed under Architecture, Architecture in Combination, Furniture, Geometry, Grasshopper, Launch
More photos here.
The Cortical Chair is a collaboration between Fishtnk and the Studio for Progressive Modelling at Yolles.
Filed under Architecture, Exhibitions, Geometry, Launch
Over the past few months, I’ve been collaborating with Mani Mani of Fishtnk on a chair for the Interior Design Show (IDS) in Toronto. The show is next week, and the chair is finished – come check it out!
Filed under Exhibitions, Geometry, Grasshopper, Launch
This release features a major reworking of the component set. Yes, we managed to break all functionality during the refactoring; No, we couldn’t figure out how to fix it for a quite while…..In the end, it all came together, though. The biggest change is that we combined the Static and Dynamic Integrators into one. This means you can toggle between the two modes on the fly. Beware, though, if you leave the timer enabled and switch to the static integration, you’ll rebuild the solution at every time step (i.e. crash)!
We have also decided to release our code for the dynamics. This means that if you adhere to structure, you can build your own dynamics.
Other developments:
New Dynamics:
Surface Attraction: Turns any list of surfaces into gravity attractors or repellers.
Surface Flow: When particles are close, they flow along any list of surfaces.
Separation: Assign a distance to be maintained between particles within a given radius.
Cohesion: Particles will tend towards the average of their neighbours.
Alignment: Particles will tend towards travelling in the same direction as their neighbours.
Dynamic Keyframe: Give collections of dynamics time intervals to be activated.
Filed under Architecture, Geometry, Grasshopper, Launch, SPM Vector Components
Michael Braund, Chris Walsh, and I just presented a paper at this year’s iteration of ACADIA, a conference focusing on digital tools and techniques in architecture. Our submission was a paper featuring a human- space interaction analysis tool called, for lack of a better or even relevant name, “Dragonfly”. I will be posting some videos and hopefully a live demo over the next few days. We received some great feedback (mainly urging us to differentiate ourselves from existing tools and to do more testing), and we will certainly take those suggestions to heart.
Some of the outstanding papers for me were Achim Menges and company’s work with wood, Maciej Kaczynski’s (et al) work with digital fabrication (i.e. Robots!) of thin masonry vaults, Skyler Tibbits’ work on large-scale self-assembly, and of course Mark Foster Gage’s keynote talk telling us all to shut up about computation. Actually, I think he was telling Patrick Schumacher to shut up about computation….but perhaps it goes for the rest of us as well.
Filed under Architecture, Launch
I’m really excited about continuing the Architecture in Combination series in 2011. While the schedule is not totally setup yet, we are looking to start in early February. Some potential topics are
Also, while the short-lecture-long-discussion format works quite well, there has been some interest in setting up full or half day workshops that further develop the connections created at the series.
Hope to see all of you there!
It’s been just about a week since our first session (Architecture in Combination with Music), and despite an extremely interesting presentation by Mani Mani (www.fishtnk.com) on his Tunable Sound Cloud, I still have questions on what it means to combine architecture and music. Granted this is a rather old debate, but judging from the number of projects that use some aspect of music or sound to drive the design, it seems to still be an active one. So here it goes.
Firstly, what is the role of music in design? Is it purely to produce data that can be fed into a geometry producing script? Can any of the emotional content of the music be revealed in the design? Should it be? And secondly, are there any practical advantages to having music as a design driver?
I’d say the most solid connection between music and architecture comes from the world of acoustics. The idea is that acoustically driven forms will enhance the performance (or at least try to), and conversely, every aspect of a given geometry can be valued in terms of how much it contributes to that performance. Unfortunately, this is a very idealized state and any acoustician will tell you that it’s just not that simple. It also completely ignores the content of the music.
Maybe there’s a kind of organizational principle hidden inside the rhythmic structure of fugues? Who knows….?
Filed under Architecture, Discussion Series, Launch, Music
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