1. A Vision for Parametric Design Presented By: Shady Youssef by Kevin Rotheroe Web Address: http://www.architectureweek.com/2002/0710/tools_1-1.html 128 10 July 2002

2. Changing The Variables Changing The Parameters For many years, software tools for mechanical engineers and industrial designers have enabled them to with work with computers in ways not available to architects. Using parametric design software, they have been able to quickly manipulate their designs and study many alternative solutions — including those with complex organic shapes — by simply changing the variables, or parameters, defining the geometry of an object or assembly

3. Software Architectural software companies have made significant progress in developing parametric tools for building design, but the tools produced tend to suffer from several limitations. They tend to work with standardized design vocabularies and construction techniques, so they cannot accommodate building designs with complex shapes beyond those directly supported by the software developers.

4. Outside the Box Architects working "outside the box" may prefer parametric software that not only accommodates any geometry, but permits the designers to circumvent standard toolbars and work directly with the software's underlying geometric functionality in customized, project-specific ways.

5. Aesthetic, Technical, and Economic implications of proposed modifications could ideally be evaluated and accommodated at any point during the design process, and the geometry of all components affected would update automatically in association with changes to the overall configuration. The Harmony!

6. A CustomObjects model of the enclosing surface of a conservatory, composed of 80 surfaces. The form can be manipulated by altering parameters that automatically adjust heights, footprints, and the "bulge factor" of surface curvatures. Image: Kevin Rotheroe and Robert Aish Parametric architectural software would ideally capture conceptual, three-dimensional design intent, enable the automatic parametric generation

7. Retrospective Application Conceptually, Waterloo is an elegant and sophisticated train shed in the tradition of the great Victorian railway stations. Working with complex site and programmatic constraints, Grimshaw had to vary the spacing between trains throughout the length of the terminal. His solution was a complex and beautifully sinuous form framed on a series of asymmetrical, hinged assemblies of "banana trusses." The trusses were conceptually similar, but they varied in size along the terminal's length. What if, Kirkland asked, one truss could have been digitally modeled and then dynamically modified in a malleable, rule-based, interactive process? And what if this assembly could then be arrayed down the length of Waterloo Station with each truss adapting automatically to the building's varying width? If CustomObjects had been available to capture the designers' intent through those parameters, it could have responded to changes late in the design process. The architects and engineers could have altered the appropriate parameters and each truss design would automatically respond.

8. Computer Programming as a Design Tool on the testing of CustomObjects by exploring the software's capacity to parametrically study the enclosing glass and polymer skin of a conservatory.conservatory The result of this collaboration is a computer model composed of 80 surfaces, and six layers of 720 nested objects. Through graphic programming, the overall architectural form can be manipulated so that a theoretically infinite number of iterations can be dynamically evaluated. One common debate about computational design tools is whether designers want to do computer programming to achieve design results. I believe that all programming decisions, especially for parametric software, are essentially design decisions. The question is whether a designer wants to be passively or actively engaged in programming. Designers who use off-the-shelf software are passively accepting the limitations embedded within the code and the graphical user interface. However, few architects are interested in becoming skilled programmers. Nonetheless, a few far-sighted practices, notably Foster's and Gehry's, have computer programmers not only on staff but fully integrated into design teams. To make parametric modeling feasible for more mainstream practices, CustomObjects will allow the designer to chose how much to customize the software by programming. The intention is that designers using CustomObjects may chose to write code directly or to "program" via graphic manipulations. Such graphically driven programming has the potential to harness additional talents of architects who might otherwise have only a passive relationship with their digital tools.