Date: Monday and Tuesday 10/13-10/14

Instructors: Keith Besserud, Josh Cotten, and Douglas Pancoast of Blackbox | SOM

In this workshop students will be guided in the creation of a collection of parametric building typology “class objects” (as in object-oriented programming) that will plug in to an urban grid which has been seeded with developmental rules. The students’ building objects will be designed to receive various types of data inputs which will have a direct effect on the way the building object’s rules cause its geometry to “grow”. For example, one student’s office building will have a set of internal rules that affect how it grows in response to its proximities to other types of buildings, the “health” of those buildings, the heights of those buildings, etc. The goal is to create a richly interrelated dynamic system that will yield interesting, emergent urbanscapes.

Class size limited to 10 students.
Prerequisite: Familiarity with object-oriented programming in VB.net or C#.net
Hardware/ software requirements: students must provide their own Windows-based laptops with Visual Studio (or the free Visual Studio Express) and Rhino 4 already installed.

Images above are a sampling from the computational portfolio of the BlackBox studio.