Workshop

Another part of our summer program was to attend a ( at least ) 10 day workshop. This workshop program was to prepare us for the real life challenges we had have to take on in the architectural world. 

I decided to attend the 10 day AA Istanbul visiting school workshop which was to be held at Istanbul Bilgi University.

The workshop under the name of Tectonic Symbiosis was a workshop with the intention of investigating he design and fabrication of a self-standing structure through the integration f computational and robotic processes. The main aim was to focus on a combination of structural, morphological and contextual factors that the design would be able to respond to so to  differentiate the material and geometrical organization.

The final design was a self supporting structure made out of foam. The design was made of smaller units which were cut by the robot. The robot was a mechanical hand which had a hot wire cutter attached. The codes were written using the KUKA PRC plugin in grasshopper. 

In the following I will give a brief of day to day activities throughout the workshop. 

Certificate

AAVS Day 1

On the first day we started off by getting to know what the whole idea of the design was about. An introduction to the studio and the attendants was followed up by a brief introduction to the tutors.  

After that we started by a quick introduction to grasshopper and learning the essentials. We went through the basic steps on grasshopper and learned how to code and design using grasshopper. Grasshopper is used alongside Rhino3d so an intro on Rhino3d was made too. 

AAVS Day 2

The grasshopper tutorials were continued and followed up by an introduction to basic robotics and the main robot we were going to  use throughout the process, KUKA PRC. 

We were explained that PRC stands for parametric robot control and we were taught the capabilities of this robot considering the fact that the final units were planned to be cut by this robot. 

Later on we had a brief introduction to Rhino Vault another plugin for Rhino3d and a complete tutorial of the plugin which would let us design vaults and calculate the weight on the vaults and figure out if the vault was capable of standing in real life or as our goal intended, was it a self-standing structure?

After that we were divided into groups to work together and propose designs for the final structure.

AAVS Day 3

We started by discussions in the groups. The path to designing a structure was kicked off by material testing. Our first day was spent on testing the material behaviors and the relationship with light and the stability. Our first approach was to cut through the material to reach a minimum thickness and test the stability and the reaction light had on it. Outstanding results were achieved with the light test despite the fact that the stability of the material was lost during the process which led us to try different approaches.

The rest of the day we attended a lecture by Saffet Kaya Bekiroglu from Zaha Hadid Architects, on the Heydar Aliyev Center in Baku. 

AAVS Day 4

We continued on the testing and group works. We assigned each person to a specific task on the group. I was trying to come up with design proposals as the others were collecting Overall / global configuration, Connection details and Physical component test on 1-1 scale. 

Given the capabilities of the robot I decided to go for a more curve based structure for the vault. Cutting curves by hand is tough but with a programmed robot it can be done. So the below design was proposed to the tutors. Also Dr. Christopher Pierce, the Director of AA Visiting Schools and AA Intermediate Unit 9 Master visited our workshop.

AAVS Day 5

After the group works and testing the fifth day was our last day to present our designs to the tutors so that one would be selected, enhanced and built to be the final structure. A couple of designs including the design I talked about before were presented. Unfortunately the design proposed by our group was not accepted. 

Later on we were all split into new groups to start on the final structure. The groups would each have specific tasks and we were given the liberty to assign ourselves to any group that seemed suitable for us. Some of the groups were, Robotics, lighting, connection, documentation, coding and onsite team. 

AAVS Day 6

 I chose the lighting team and we all started the testing right away. I first started a couple of simple LED tests on the foam blocks. The main goal was to light up the final structure but as easy as it sounded the task was not as simple. We also worked on the final coding that was going to go into the cutting of the components. We also had a lecture by Matthias Rippmann from ETH Zurich on vaults.

AAVS Day 7

 The components were finally ready to be cut meaning the code was finished. With that out of the way, our lighting team started some experiments on natural ( Daylight ) and LED lights . We started out tests on the 3d models and used Vray for light renderings. 

AAVS Day 8

We continued to test with the LEDs only this time we did it on real blocks and with LED strips. We tried different positions and different angles for the strips to get the best result. In the end we calculated and achieved the best spot for the LEDs to be placed. Below are photos of our tests with the strips and blocks.

AAVS Day 9

With the lighting almost ready I went on to help with the other groups. The connection group had to empty foam blocks and make concrete to fill them with. The concrete would be heavy and as a result would connect the walls of the vault on the ground. The ninth day was all hard work on making concrete and emptying blocks.  In the afternoon we also had a lecture by Sina Mostafavi from Delft Hyperbody team about robotic fabrication.

AAVS Day 10

The last day was the assembly day. The structure was scheduled to be done by 19:00. The groups overcame intense working to achieve the goal. The concrete blocks were dry by the morning and the assembly group was busy connecting the robot-cut components to each other. After the connection of the components was finished we all brought the vault outside to mount it on the walls. After the vault was in place the lighting group took wheel to place the LEDs. Two extra foam parts were cut out and added to the walls with shafts for the LED strips to rest in. By the afternoon the lighting was finished and the workshop came to an end.