DesCours 2009

FADarch is pleased to have been part of this year’s annual DesCours (http://www.descours.us/) event in New Orleans. Francis Bitonti (FADarch) and Brian Osborn (bo-th.com) collaborated to construct a 500sqft robotic canopy titled “openHouse prototype two”

Concept:
openHouse is an illuminated canopy filling the upper portion of a small courtyard. As participants fill the courtyard the space is transformed by a field of kinetic devices. Our objective is to create a fluid public condition which is programmed by habitation and social interaction. Participants control the architecture through the seating. The ceiling is created from a grid of robotic components. The components randomly contract and expand while at rest. When the space is empty only one turns on at a time. As people begin to occupy the seating under the canopy, more components begin flickering on and off. Two people will cause three units to randomly dance around three people will activate four and four people will activate 5 etc…

opening night video


Video of openHouse during construction

ACADIA 09

Francis Bitonti will be presenting his paper titled “Computational Tectonics” at this years Acadia conference. The paper outlines a methodology for encoding and decoding material assemblages as discrete computational systems.

Abridged Abstract:

This paper outlines a methodology for encoding and decoding material assemblages as discrete computational systems. Exploiting the combinatorial nature of tectonic systems makes it possible to produce a population of “material algorithms” capable of exhibiting a wide range of behaviors. Encoding assemblages as discrete systems affords the designer the ability to enumerate and search all possible permutations of a tectonic system. In this paper, we will discuss the calculations and computational processes used to encode material assemblages as populations of discrete algorithms.

For more information about the conference please see the conference website

Opening Night

Last night was the opening reception for the Wild Child Exhibition at the Bridge Gallery in Manhattan.

WILD CHILD

http://bridgegalleryny.com/wildchild/

FADarch will be showing work in the “Wild Child” exhibition at the Bridge Gallery in Manhattan. The exhibition will run from July 9^th to September 2^nd.

Peter Macapia and Marilyn Garber of bridgegallery are pleased to present WildChild, a unique array of computationally experimental art, architecture and design involving the latest experiments in digital and algorithmic computing and advanced fabrication. Each of the designers in this exhibition have taught and evolved over the last decade using digital, animation, scripting, and parametric software tools. However, they have recently begun to develop idiosyncratic attitudes that continually defy easy categorization either in methodology or results. They are essentially ‘wild’ in their technical ambition and in their aesthetic. In that sense, the artists, designers, and architects in this exhibition are moving towards new theories, new territories, and new problems.

The extraordinary range of skill and technique exhibited through WildChild comes from a rigorous and continued manipulation of software tools branching into the generation of code, and producing exotic results. The question becomes how these processes result or impinge upon material considerations and aesthetic affect. Selecting work that represents major developments from New York City on the East Coast and Los Angeles on the West Coast, WildChild introduces a new generation of work tempered by the differences in urban environment as well as design sensibility and fabrication.

WildChild includes:

Aranda\Lasch

FPmod

p-a-t-t-e-r-n-s

Atilier Manferdini

Kokkugia

SOFTlab

Biothing

Kol/Mac

Supermanoeuvre

Emergent

Murmur

Testa & Weiser

FADarch

Noah Olmsted

THEVERYMANY

Squiggle Script

Click to see the code

Nearest Neighbor Script

This is a nearest neighbor script I have been working on in Mathematica.

Click to see the code

AAST Advanced Architecture Settimo Tokyo Biennale

FADarch was invited to exhibt work in the 2009-2011  Advanced Architecture Settimo Tokyo Biennale.

The Rause Hill Natatorium Project will be exhibited from  7 April to 17 May 2009 in Turin, Italy.

The House of Arts and Architecture Association CASARTARC settled in Settimo Torinese, Turin, is developing a project called ‘Advanced Architecture Settimo Tokyo’ (AAST), a group of Generative Architecture events: workshops, a two days conference and an exhibition with venues in Settimo & Tokyo and possibly Cagliari & London.

The events of AAST focus on the approach to design through parametric design tools, such as Rhinoscript, Grasshopper, Mel script, DP, GC.

The first stage of the exhibition will run from 7 April to 17 May 2009 in Turin, Italy. The opening conference for the exhibition will be made by Patrik Schumacher (partner at Zaha Hadid Architects). The exhibition will travel to Tokyo, Japan in May 2010.

Project team:

FADarchitecture (Francis Anthony Bitonti)

BOTH (Brian Osborn)

Severn Clay Studio (Severn Clay-Youman)

The following video will be among the materials shown at the exhibition. 

OPENING NIGHT: Future.city.Past>FORWARD Exhibition

Last night I attended the opening reception for the Future.city.Past>FORWARD Exhibition at the d3 gallery.

These are some images and photographs of the submission from FADarch (Francis A. Bitonti)

Crawler_Urbanism

DEFINE: Web Crawler:::: “a computer program that browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner. Other terms for Web crawlers are ants, automatic indexers, bots, and worms or Web spider, Web robot.”

_wikiPedia.org

FADarch to Appear in Future.city.Past>FORWARD Exhibition

Francis Bitonti was selected to exhibit work in the Future.city.Past>FORWARD exhibition

For more information Please see this URL

http://www.d3space.org/

Launching FrancisAnthony.com

Francis A. Bitonti has started a new website to keep track of projects not related to FADarch, including teaching and other research projects.

 The URL is_

http://www.francisanthony.com/

Processing Workshop

Francis Bitonti is giving a Processing Workshop for the New York City College of Technology department of Architectural Technology.The workshop will focus on programming agent based decentralized, self-organizing systems. 

Feel free to look through the workshop website for code and the lesion plan.

LINK TO WORKSHOP WEBSITE 

Cadalyst Magazine Publishes FADarch

Cadalyst Magazine has published a story about the Squiggle Rack design for the NYC department of Transportation CityRacks competition.

http://www.cadalyst.com/

ECA with Network Neighbors

This demonstration by Francis A. Bitonti has recently been accepted for publication on the wolfram demonstrations project.

Elementary Cellular Automaton with Network

http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/ElementaryCellularAutomatonWithNetwork/

This Demonstration shows what happens when you reconfigure the neighborhood of an elementary cellular automaton (ECA). The ECA plot shows an elementary cellular automaton; the ECA with network neighbors view shows that same elementary cellular automaton, but the neighborhoods have been redefined to reflect the graph view. In this Demonstration the neighbors of each automaton in the center plot are defined by the network.