The workshops, hosted by the Center for Information Technology and Architecture (CITA) in Copenhagen Denmark,  involved about one hundred selected participants working in workshop or “cluster” groups on a specific design challenge.  Each group designed and fabricated something in four days, in inspiring and intense surroundings, learning and sharing skills.  The atmosphere in the workshop space was buzzing with energy as groups of students experimented with sensors and robots, programmed custom software tools and assembled digitally fabricated components.

All four nights, work continued almost all night, in one large space. This year’s theme was “Building the Invisible” and the workshops were held in Copenhagen, Denmark, at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture.  Ten workshop clusters occupied spaces in the large lecture hall, making use of on-site woodworking, digital fabrication and workshop facilities.

The collaboration between design tutors and professors with members of industry and practising designers makes this yearly event very different from typical design conferences.  The participants have formed a community over the years, with many attendees coming year after year. Despite being from often competing design offices such as Foster + Partners, SOM, and Buro Happold or research institutes such as University of Pennsylvania, RMIT in Australia, and the Architectural Association in London, participants and workshop leaders come together and take time from hectic work and travel schedules to research together in small, multi-disciplinary groups.

The groups have participants with various knowledge areas and skill levels and it creates an exciting dynamic when an associate from EMBT in Barcelona could end up sitting next to a Master´s degree student from London, or a computer scientist from New York.  The workshops, like all positions in the SmartGeometry community, are led by volunteers, and becoming a cluster leader is the result of a competitive process of applying to pose a research question within the overall theme.

All four nights, work continued almost all night, in one large space. This year’s theme was “Building the Invisible” and the workshops were held in Copenhagen, Denmark, at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture.  Ten workshop clusters occupied spaces in the large lecture hall, making use of on-site woodworking, digital fabrication and workshop facilities.

In the center of the space, the “Agent Construction” cluster participants built a pixelated looking wall from thousands of folded white cardboard balls. According to their brief: “Agent Construction aims to demonstrate how ‘invisible’ processes (in this case air and energy flows) generated by an emerging structure can create a feedback loop where generation happens real time in physical space and analysis happens virtually.”

The workshop cluster was run by architects and design tutors David Andreen and Petra Jenning with engineer and termite building expert Rupert Soar.   The three are among the co-founders of Freeform Construction in the UK.  At the beginning of the workshop, the participants designed a strict set of rules for how to compose and build the structure, which was comprised of around 4000 hand folded, cardboard octahedrons. 

Using the rules they decided upon for the installation, they fixed the cardboard balls to one another using glue guns. During the building process, a 3D laser scanner was used to accurately mark the position of each ball and this information was fed into Processing and then feedback from simulations and performance was communicated back into the “agents” who continued to build the structure.  Software was used to analyze the emerging structure and simulate alternative rules, which could then be applied to the ongoing construction process in order to evolve the outcome.

The main sponsor of the workshops and conference is software designers Bentley (who make Microstation and Generative Components among other programs) and SmartGeometry offers discounted rates for students.  The aim of the workshops is to offer themes that inspire creative problem-solving and unexpected design results. 

In the corner of the large hall, the cluster was trying to grow fungus and employ robot gardeners.  This “artificial ecology” consisted of fungus growing in CNC milled landscape with laser cut plexiglass architectural models.  The landscape had embedded sensors connected to custom designed and programmed Arduino boards and to parametric scripts using Grasshopper.

The workshop participants constructed robotic “gardeners” who could water and tend to the fungus to create a healthy garden.  The robots were equipped with sensors that let them know where the fungus was growing and therefore where they should garden.

In the far corner of the space, students were building and testing spaces for sound.  “Responsive Acoustic Surfacing” focused on the parameterization of hyperbolic paraboloid geometry as used by pre-digital parametric architect Antoni Gaudi and it explored the sonic potential of this geometry.  The participants investigated sound scattering and a 1:1 wall was designed and built using this geometry. The design of the wall was based on feedback from the physical acoustic testing of 3D printed 1:10 scale models using a scale reverberation chamber.  The wall was constructed from CNC cut formwork and cast plaster panels.  This experimental wall was built next to the same wall with standard construction.

Participants and visitors on the final day could experience the different geometries of the two walls and hear the different spaces. The workshop was led by four architects from RMIT in Melbourne Australia: Prof Mark Burry, (who brought expertise from his role as executive architect of Gaudi´s Sagrada Familia in Barcelona), Jane Burry, Alexander Pena de Leon, and Daniel Davis.

After the workshops, a conference day was held with invited speakers including Ben van Berkel, Usman Haque, Mette Ramsgaard Thomsen and Billie Faircloth.

www.smartgeometry.org
All photos by Anders Ingvartsen

Terri Peters is an architect, writer and PhD Fellow based in Copenhagen Denmark www.terripeters.net