Week 5, 6 ARCH-2347 2014 Fall
Course	ARCH-2347
Date	2014/10/13
Learning Objectives	Collection types -- polylines, polygons and meshes -- are shown to have a common basis of construction. In the workshop, we continue manipulating geometric properties of objects, specifically for the purpose of creating components that can be populated across a collection of such objects. The midterm assignment will also be discussed.
Agenda	Lecture Collection Types Workshop Mesh Manipulation Components based on Geometric Properties Responsive Componentry Midterm
Uses Tool(s)

Lecture

Workshop

The workshop file can be accessed on the Class Dropbox under Workshops/ week5 .ghx

In class we will work primarily with meshes. Manipulation of other collection types like PLine, PGon and Rgon are covered in more detail in the workshop file as well as the relevant examples below. Refer to the slideshow for a presentation about how all of these collection types (Mesh, PLine, PGon, and RGons) have a commonality in their superclasses ‐ HasBasis and HasPts.

Relevant Examples

All of these can be found in the Examples folder:

• Regular Tiling
• Dressed Tiling

Midterm

From Generative Pattern to Active Facade - You will be taking an initial building facade and 'activating' its geometry based on a solar incidence analysis. Take inspiration from the examples of built projects with geometric differentiation at the facade in response to the sun that were pinned up in class.

The main parts of this project are the following:

1. Capturing an initial building facade geometry
2. Performing a solar incidence analysis on the geometry
3. Designing a geometric response to this analysis

The Geometry

Your initial building facade geometry can either be an existing building facade (e.g. a facade in Providence), a project from a previous studio, or optionally (and in discussion with me) a completely hypothetical building form. The way that you capture your geometry will depend on your intended response (part 3). In class, for instance, we took an extruded surface and captured it as a mesh with variable spacing along both the floor perimeter and the floor height which demarcated the scale of the glazing units and the scale of the intended response. If your response will only affect parts of the building facade (such as only at the windows) then this may be captured more effectively by other collection types (such as polygons).

Solar Incidence Analysis

See a detailed discussion at Solar Incidence Analysis . This analysis is site location specific so once you are ready to embark on this part, you will need to choose the closest approximation to your site location amongst the locations offered at Energy Plus Weather Data and download the corresponding EPW file.

The Geometric Response

Even though this is listed as the last part, this will likely be where you start. Your response might be in the design of a mechanism (e.g. fins, frits, ocular devices) or it might be compositional (like making a decision about how inset a window will be in the depth of a wall). Further refinement of your response will go hand in hand with decisions about what kind and amount of solar incidence data will influence your design. There are other factors such as view or structural capacity that you may want to incorporate into your design even if these are not explicitly measured.

Deliverables

This project is due in 2 weeks on 10.27 . There will be a desk crits next week (10.20) during class. It is highly advised that you and your midterm partner have acquainted yourselves with each of these parts.

For your final deliverables, please prepare 5 slides that illustrate the following:

• Describe the rationale for your design. This might include an illustration of your initial design concept and how your concept evolved. This must include how you have taken the solar incidence analysis into consideration.
• What are the parameters of your design? In addition to illustrating tradeoffs that you may have encountered by only taking beam intensity into consideration, this may be good way to detail the process that you have undertaken to incorporate other considerations (such as view, structural capacity) or insights gained from the weather file. Demonstrate the range of solutions generated by your design and the selection methods/criteria that you have developed to select amongst this range of solutions given the specific site location.
• Show suitable orthographic projects and perspectives of your design solution .
• Discuss the issues in extending your solution to another location.

Please place your slides and all accompanying code into a folder called Midterm_[Last Name 1]_[Last Name 2] into each of your Dropbox folders before class. Your team will be giving a tight 10 minute presentation about your project in class.