Last week, the first-year architectural geometry course was about pattern deformations. Students are expected to familiarize themselves with 2d drawing, transformation, and control point editing commands while trying to design a deformation. After studying regular and semi-regular tessellations of the plane, they are expected to develop reasoning on the rule-based and iterative processes. This also constructed an underpinning for Basic Design‘s “Metamorphosis” study, where they have discussed more conceptual frameworks derived from such systems. Below are some of the results from this one-week exercise. We named it “Pattern Deformations Exercise”;

Adnan Faysal Altunbozar

Ayşe Cilsim

Ayşen Ünal

Elif Özüçağlıyan

İzgi Güven

Kübra Göl

Sema Öztel

Zeynep Albaş

Pattern Deformations Exercise is very successful in terms of being on the intersection between design, geometry, and computer-aided drawing. Since 2010, the Design Geometry course at İstanbul Bilgi University Faculty of Architecture includes this exercise in the first-year education. Above, you see some student works from 2012 classes. I believe we can further advance this exercise. Later on, we developed a laser-cut version of this exercise where students produced some frames with this exercise’s results. Also, there are many studies applying this kind of pattern deformation via programming languages such as Python and Grasshopper in Rhino. There are several publications about this and the original exercise named “Parquet Deformations”. You can find them by searching this website. I will try to put more resources and tutorials in the future about this topic. It is a beautiful art and a good educational exercise.