Sunday, 14 August 2011

Architecture Now is understood as having a motion or movement embodied in its design, which separates it from the conventional static of traditional form language. In recent years this has been characterised by curvilinear geometry and complex, mass-customised components that are at the heart of contemporary architectural discourse today. Together, these design aspirations require considerable computational skill beyond the average use of CAD or 3D visualisation modeling. Architectural practices should have a widely available "general scripting" knowledge base spread more or less uniformly around the office and the project teams. This consist in general of Maya MEL and VB scripting in Rhino (and, more recently, Digital Project) as well as the ability to produce and replicate quite sophisticated parametric reconfigurable models using Maya, Rhino's Grasshopper and Digital Project's Power-Copy. If Scripting and programing is understood as knowledge-capture that can be repeatedly applied, then "parametric modelling" can be seen as a form of of visual programming that in many cases accomplishes the same thing, but without requiring the user to learn extensive scripting syntax and grammar.