I’m excited to announce that I’ll be doing another version of my Rhino.Python workshop in New York this November 9-11. Find out more and register at www.pointcrowd.com.
SoaPy
I’ve been working on these soap film simulations with the Center for Bits and Atoms. There’s more videos and information here.
SoaPy – tube from Ari Kardasis on Vimeo.
Aperiodic Tiling
Below is some work from my ongoing thesis : The Soft Grid, which is an investigation into the spatial organizations of architecture through the lens of gridding systems.
This video demonstrates the running of an algorithm that I’m developing which tiles the plane using parallelogram shaped units. In this case, there are ten different tiles generated from five vectors. You can see the program putting the tiles down in a blob shape and retracing its steps whenever there is a conflict resulting from tiles bumping into one another. The red concentric tree is a representation of the data structure that is being used and the blue meshwork is a designation of adjacency, which is a fundamental aspect of a gridding system.
I will be posting more on my thesis as it develops.
Face Folders
This project is a little late in the blogging but here it is:
Face folding is an idea that I came up with for Erik Demaine‘s folding class. Basically you start with a polyhedron and deform each face in plane while keeping the edge lengths fixed. Not too much is known about these mathematical objects but my concern was to build them:
Above is a dodecahedron. The next few are the slightly easier to see cube.
Everything is made of 1/16″ water-jet aluminum cut into a lot of very simple pieces.
Pieces are assembled into flat polygons.
Which are in turn assembled into polyhedra.
Point Crowd
Masoud Akbarzadeh and I have put together a website with a good deal of material for the upcoming release of RhinoScript in Python. Take a look : www.pointcrowd.com

Point Crowd : RhinoScript and lots of tiny things
BuzzBack at SIGRADI 2010
I will be teaching a workshop at the SIGRADI 2010 conference entitled “Living in Stereo : notes from the signal”. It is an exploration of the BuzzBack project that I’ve been working on for the last several months and will include an introduction to the software, the mathematics of signal processing and an extended lab time in which the students will be able to create a symphony of customized buzzers. More to come.
Machinic Processes
Ice House Site Visit
Summer’s over and it’s studio time. On Friday, MIT’s second year architecture students went on a site visit to the Boston Ice Storage Company on Norfolk St. in Boston. The studio will be an adaptive reuse of this remarkable 8 story concrete box in the New Market area of Roxbury. I’ll be acting as head TA for this course and will hopefully be updating with impressive and exciting work by the students.
In mid-August, the block that the building is on suffered a massive fire that leveled one of the adjacent buildings but left the Ice House untouched because of it’s construction, namely concrete. The building has been in disuse for several years and, with the exception of some discoloration, looked just like this before the fire. The inside is totally striking. As John Ochsendorf said “It’s a 20th century Peter Zumthor chapel.”
All photos by George Lin:





LaN at KVArch
This past Friday, Sheila Kennedy asked me to come to her office to present some of the work that I’ve been doing for them this summer. Also present was a delegate from Live Architecture Network who are doing really cool things.
There were presentations from her office including Patricia Gruits talking about an interactive light curtain that they’ve been working on:
Then LAN went on to discus a .NET based grasshopper module that they’ve been working on which allows for dynamic input from extra-rhino sources, such as Processing. Below, Monika Wittig (in real life) and Luis Fraguada (Skyping in from Barcelona) from LAN.
It was a great afternoon and a good time was had by all.













