When thinking about serious and specific topics, I suddenly find myself looking back at the basics again. Catenary curves, are not the most beautiful one among those mathematical forms found in nature. However, it still tells us a lot about structures. The name apparently comes from catenaria, the Latin word for “chain”. This Grasshopper code was actually an example from our book 10 years ago (link here). It seems catenary curves could potentially be used in a type of dome…

Last year, for the midterm assignment in our first-year basic design studio, we gave our students a range of different, randomly generated contexts to work with. For this purpose, I developed a small Grasshopper tool that makes the graph of a function look as much like a terrain model as possible. This tool is not really a procedural terrain generator. I would genuinely like to build one, someday. What we have here is simply a function surface. At the inputs,…

I’m looking forward to teaching Design Mathematics, a compulsory course in Istanbul Bilgi University’s graduate program in Architectural Design. The course was previously offered as an elective in the undergraduate program (here). Over time, I have also shared parts of the course content on the blog, particularly the sections on linear algebra and Rhino Python. Unfortunately, though, I have never quite managed to turn this material into the book project I had envisioned. Perhaps this semester I’ll finally make it…

The 2025 IAAC Istanbul Summer school was conducted at İstanbul Bilgi University last year. Yesterday, a video was published about it on YouTube. It was prepared by Arkitekt. Here is the video: This reminded me the workshop and I decided to write about my side of the study. The reciprocal structure was designed by Gamze Gündüz, where she finalized it using a Grasshopper code. Then, the timber elements were labeled and sized with the help of Grasshopper again and integrated…

While digging through my archives, I found an old animation I made in 2023. Back then, I was generating patterns with Parakeet. Thanks to this talented add-on, I managed to create a nice pattern by dressing a different component onto a Snub Square tiling base. However, for some reason, things started turning into a horror movie after that. MultiPipe was popular back then. So, I converted this pattern into surfaces using MultiPipe and attempted an animation using Rhino’s rendered viewport…

Today, Efecan and I attached the sandblasting device to the robotic arm. The device sprays a special sandblasting material onto surfaces using air pressure. Thus, it is used for cleaning moldy and dirty surfaces in buildings under restoration. Under normal conditions, the sandblasting gun is controlled manually. If the cleaning is too light, it remains insufficient, but it shouldn’t be so intense as to erode the stone either. Normally, the operator performs this control visually. Here, the potential uses for…

​In this article, I will attempt a small intervention in contemporary artificial intelligence discussions with an old philosophical example. Our hypothesis is this: ​”Artificial intelligence is very powerful at defining and reproducing existing patterns. However, experiencing that which is not there, absence, negation, and nothingness, as a lived condition belongs exclusively to human consciousness.” Jean-Paul Sartre, in his famous “Cafe Example” from his 1943 work “Being and Nothingness“, describes the experience of someone entering a crowded cafe to find a…

The logic of computer programming has fascinated me since childhood. The same way of thinking also lies behind design mathematics, which is now my main field of interest. Searching for the simplicity behind things, looking for the fundamentals, and identifying the most meaningful basic elements has always been my greatest challenge. With this intention, Designcoding went online in 2011. I tried to share my research, some student work, and news. While learning computational geometry, I wanted to teach it as…

Exploring dual polyhedra in Grasshopper is an interesting topic. In this post, I try to generate the dual of any polyhedron using Rhino Python and possibly Grasshopper. I developed this code for Rhino Python earlier here, and now I have converted it into a Grasshopper-Python component for better usability. I start the process by breaking the polyhedron into individual faces and gathering the corner points of each face. These points become the vertices of the dual polyhedron. Then, for each…

String art is a captivating technique that combines geometry and aesthetics to recreate images using lines between pins. Here is a good reference to start studying it. In this post, I explored a custom Rhino Python script designed for Rhinoceros 7 and 8. It transforms a grayscale image into a dense web of threads. The algorithm analyzes the darkest areas of the image and connects pins in a circular layout to form compositions. The script begins by converting a user-selected…