Graduate Diploma news

With G01 operating as the new location for the School’s workstations, together with the arrival of our new laser cutter and 3d printer, we are looking forward to some exciting work coming out of the Diploma this year. Access to the new equipment will be rolled out across the school during the course of the year. We hope that anyone interested in these technologies will soon be able to employ them in their design work.

Images: David Collett

Generative elements: Examples of Graduate Diploma stage 5 work

During the autumn we held Autodesk Maya workshops for stages 4 and 5 to enhance students capacities to design and test work in high–end digital environments. For stage 5, key areas of exploration were the development of models suitable to be used to test the results of the application of simulated forces, the construction and deployment of hybrid IK/dynamics systems,  fluid dynamics operations and an introduction to N-cloth virtual fabric systems.

Images: ΟΔΥΣΣΕΑΣ ΑΛΕΠΟΥΔΕΛΗΣ

Integrated with the stage 5 workshops, Generativ08 was a project in which students developed an aspect of their design work outside the envelope of programmatic speculation.  Students developed a material system which was subsequently elaborated, tested and proliferated in a series of exercises.Originated as a physical construct, the initial configurations were studied in a series of self-initiated experiments which addressed component performance in a variety of conditions. The outcomes from these experiments informed the second phase of the work in which digital models were constructed and tested in Maya. Finally, the Maya components were adapted for re-materialisation, using the Laser cutter: some examples of these processes and experiments are shown here.

Images: Katerina Vlachou

These works are intended to inflect the organisation of nascent theses from material–morphogenetic axes and to encourage speculations on the opportunities and vicissitudes of the processes of translation which characterise architectural production. I hope that over the coming year, we will be able to research and explore in greater detail the new technologies which currently supplement and may one day replace conventional approaches to representation, communication and realisation between the designer, the means of production and the artifact.

Images: L-Phil Davies, R-Shaun Kennedy

The explicit linking of digital information to material production is set to transform the way we make buildings. Computer driven fabrication is increasingly affordable and is becoming more and more widely available. These technologies have the potential to create new economic as much as formal structures for the profession. CSA is committed to equipping students with both theoretical and practical abilities to creatively engage with these structures. It should be an interesting year ahead.

John Culmer Bell