Have you ever thought about making a damped pendulum in Grasshopper? I have no idea why, but I did. I just decided to transfer a Python snippet I found online into a Grasshopper definition. Here, the Initial Angle (Radians) Number slider sets the initial angle to any value from 0 to Pi. The letter G represents the acceleration due to gravity (approximately 9.81 m/s2). This is the primary force pulling the pendulum downward. As you know, pendulums wouldn’t swing without…

The mandatory course Readings on Digital Culture in the Graduate Program in Architectural Design at Istanbul Bilgi University began with the introductory chapter of Charlie Gere’s Digital Culture. We will write a response paper every week. I have completed my response to the first reading. The reading begins with the parallel development of the Industrial Revolution and capitalism. It then follows this history up to the emergence of today’s computers. It looks at how money gradually became a more abstract…

Over the past few months, I bought a cheap and affordable 3D printer, and I am quite satisfied with it. The Creality Hi model printer has advanced features and its quality is not bad at all. Compared to the Ultimaker printers we used in the past, technology has naturally evolved over the years, and certain processes have become much easier. With this occasion, I wanted to share the literature review I conducted for a project. Maybe it will be useful…

How much work we did last year for first-year architectural education! The tensile fabric study we carried out using Grasshopper Kangaroo in “Design Computing”, a first-year course I coordinated alongside my colleague Serkan Uysal, served as a baseline for the material research addressed in the Basic Design studio at that time. Such geometric optimizations in Kangaroo are no longer surprising or novel to anyone. However, experiencing these tools and possibilities in architectural education in the very first year offers a…

Let’s take a closer look at the midterm jury assignment for our “Field & Matter”- themed Computation-based Basic Design 2 studio, which I conducted last year alongside Serkan Uysal, İpek Kuran, and Sinan Logie. I shared the studio’s final project, Earthbound, in a previous post. In this post, we will focus on our process-oriented midterm project named Spacebound. Topography as a Data Field In this first major phase of the “Field & Matter” studio, we examined how moving and stationary…

The development of geometry began by measuring the world as discrete objects. Moving beyond measuring nature, it evolved into reasoning, calculation, and mathematics. Platonic solids were one of the most elegant and beautiful ideas reached by geometry. Pondering why there are only five of them was a tribute to collective human intelligence. Earlier in this blog, we modeled polyhedra, like the Platonic solids, using geometric construction methods. This process was like solving a puzzle. To construct a point whose distances…

Last year, during the first stage of the Architectural Design Graduate project, our student team made a quick preparation and participated in the experimental works exhibition at the International Antalya Architecture Biennale (IABA 2025). This was a challenging yet educational process for our team. Using EPS foam and the robotic hotwire cutter (RHWC), a production run of 125 units, consisting of two modules (95 octahedra and 30 icosahedral units), was carried out. The icosahedral units also underwent an additional cutting…

While trying to program the curves produced by Spirograph toys in Grasshopper, I took a slightly different path. The topic eventually led to a broader heading: harmonic motion, and from there, to the Fourier Series we looked at previously. This simple Python code models Fourier Synthesis, driven by circles of different radii in a very straightforward way. The Python component sets up a loop that calculates the effect of each circle to the x and y values, individually. In this…

In his groundbreaking 1935 text ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,‘ Walter Benjamin questioned how photography and cinema radically transformed the nature of art. According to him, what made a work of art unique was its singular existence in time and space, its ‘aura’. Mechanical reproduction techniques shook this aura, detaching the work from its traditional context and offering it up for mass consumption. Today, we stand at a completely different threshold. Generative AI tools are…

This is the last of the site analysis tools we previously used in the midterm project of first-year architecture education. As you may recall, we previously introduced a tool that generates topographies based on specific parameters. Afterward, we examined two tools that perform slope and flow analyses on these topographies. Today, we are presenting a tool that analyzes curvature. This topic actually constitutes one of the interesting intersection points between architectural design and differential geometry. Curvature is not something architects…