Review: Grasshopper Algorithmic Modeling for Rhinoceros 5

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Grasshopper Algorithmic Modeling for Rhinoceros 5 http://www.grasshopper3d.com It is only since the nineteenth century that we have been able to speak of Western architectural history and design as clearly separate disciplines. To make this distinction, we have had to draw clear borders between the disciplines’ respective methods and practices. This has not always been easy. Historians have long used the tools of design—such as plans, elevations, and diagrams—as part of their analytical tool kit, while architects have used the tropes and techniques of historical formal analysis through diagrams as a projective act of design in its own right. Sometimes the distinction collapses completely. When Rudolf Wittkower published his famous eleven diagrams of known Palladian villas, he included an additional one titled “Geometric Pattern of Palladio's Villas.”1 While each of the eleven original diagrams was congruent with the building plan on which it was based—as if it had been traced—the additional diagram depicted a set of idealized geometric relationships that did not correspond to the footprint of any one villa. This twelfth diagram, freed as it was from reference to a specific historical object, uncomfortably blurred the distinction between historical analysis and design proposition. To complicate this distinction further, architects have sometimes used formal diagrammatic analysis as a generative design method. Peter Eisenman, for example, has used a derivative of Wittkower's twelfth diagram as the starting point for rule-based formal development of a series of houses.2 More recently, architects grappling with a range of new digital tools and techniques have returned to history as a means of grounding their work within the core of the discipline through the digitally mediated formal analysis of precedents. Their tools—primarily the application of computer-aided design and scripting—along with the methods by which they are applied ask us to rethink the role of history in architectural production and offer new techniques …