Saeed Arida, Becca Edson MIT, School of Architecture, Cambridge, USA 317
Part I: Pedagogical Framework
Structure
The studio was divided into two phases. The first phase involved analyzing an object
in terms of its performance. The second stage involved designing a sports museum
along the Hudson River Park on the west side of Manhattan.
Design studios traditionally start with abstract exercises to cultivate students’
creativity and help them formulate frameworks, conceptual and technical, that can be
later used in the final architectural projects. These exercises usually address specific
issues pertaining to the topic and scale of the studio. Contrary to this practice, our
studio started from analyzing an existing object with prominent formal features.
This was followed by a process of abstract manipulation which involved developing
computational systems that suggest architectural interpretation which led to the
final form. In so doing, the studio started and ended with form, and was mediated
by a process of abstract manipulation.
Computational Background
Design is an iterative non-linear process in which many shifts of perspective occur.
In the studio we sought after a computational system that can accommodate these
shifts of perspective in the design process without having to rebuild your system
every time.
This strategy materialized in response to a previous studio at MIT in which
parametric software was used. Parametric design is a process of rigidifying certain
parameters while keeping others variable. By changing the values of these variable
parameters, new variations result. Although the extreme manipulation of certain
parameters might sometime produce an emergent form, parametric design is still a
very limiting design methodology, especially in the early design phase. Therefore we
chose to focus on a more flexible design process.
3D Studio Max was the software choice. 3d Studio Max offered a fluid and flex-
ible set of tools to work with especially at the early stages of design. As a modeling
tool within 3d Studio Max we used editable poly. Editable poly is an editable object
with five sub-object levels: vertex, edge, border, polygon, and element. Each poly
is equipped with controls for manipulating an object at various sub-object levels.
Editable poly can also be subjected to all the modifiers that already exist in 3d
Studio Max.
figure 1
Tools
The idea of high performance necessitated decomposing the object under investi-
gation into smaller components that can be handled separately. We sought after a