Intro to Robotic Fabrication

The work is progressing nicely in the Intro to Robotic Fabrication seminar at Taubman College.  The work of the seminar is aggregated on the course blog (HERE).

The seminar uses the Kuka Agilus Workcell to explore the potential of parametric thinking with architectural models.  The architectural model represents an important site for architectural speculation and as computational processes create design ambitions where quantity drive qualities robots become a critical mode of architectural model production.

Image from Team BMO in the seminar.  Here they are using the two robots to hold strips of waxed felt to produce a model of precisely twisted surfaces. 

ParaMod Seminar - Tutorial001

This semester the ParaMod seminar will be addressing the role of precedent and our ability to build on and manipulate existing rules and work.  Tutorial001 asks the students to model the plan of an existing project, uncover the rules, and produce 5 variations.

The student work blogs will be aggregated in the widget in the bottom right.

The following tutorial gives my quick approach to such a problem.  The tutorial models Borromini's San Carlo and UN Studio's Ponte Parodi project.  Click the image to start the streaming video.

Assemblies and Aggregations

A recent exhibit in the college gallery showcased student work from my ParaMod seminar and from Glenn Wilcox’s Digital Fabrication Seminar.







This post seemed like a good opportunity to post some of the work from last semester. Click on the project images to open the final PDF board which shows various configurations and mutations.

Generating Drawings

Short tutorial that explains how to generate drawings using the drawing workbench in Digital Project. Click the image to start the streaming video.

Random Numbers linked from Excel

This tutorial will describe the creation of a design table, allowing for the control of geometry from an Excel spread sheet. The design table is also useful for input and output of data from Digital Project. Using the random number generator from Excel, a rule is created to randomly open or close the geometry of a powercopy.

Here is a link to the video.

Digital Project - Tutorial 5 - Document Templates

This is the fifth and last comprehensive tutorial for the ParaMod seminar. The five tutorials should give everyone a basic understanding of many of functions. I will continue to add shorter more specific tutorials.


Document templates allow for advanced replicatiopn at the product level, each part of the syetem is a separate file.


Click the image below to view the 40 minute streaming video.

Digital Project - Tutorial 4 - Power Copies

Here is the fourth Digital Project tutorial developed for the ParaMod Seminar.

It is 45 minutes long and introduces advanced replication using a simple framework.

Click the image below to go to the streaming video.

Digital Project - Tutorial 3 - Part to Whole

Here is the third Digital Project tutorial developed for the ParaMod Seminar.

It is 48 minutes long and introduces solids and part / product relationships.

Click the image below to go to the streaming video.

Digital Project - Tutorial 2 - Surfaces

Here is the second Digital Project tutorial developed for the ParaMod Seminar.


It is 65 minutes long and builds on tutorial 1. Here we will use the first sketch to drive the height and shape of the covering surface. At this point the form is less of a concern than learning how to develop the interactions.


Click the image below to go to the streaming video. I am still working on the best format / size/ player for the tutorials. This one is a bit large and takes a minute to load.

Digital Project - Tutorial 1 - The Sketch

Here is the first Digital Project tutorial developed for the ParaMod Seminar. It is 42 minutes long and covers the interface and the sketch. Let me know if I left anything out.

Click the image below to go to the streaming video.

ParaMod Seminar: Structural Density

It is that time of the year; back to school. This semester I will be running the ParaMod grad seminar at the Univ or Michigan School of Architecture. Rather than work with a different topic I am continuing the work that we started in the spring term. The seminar will again be looking at the relationship between structure and organization. Obviously the associativity and intelligence of the Digital Project modeling environment allows for various ways to explore the topic.

The plan is to post samples of the student work to share the research. A series of video tutorials will be developed to support the seminar work. I will be posting these tutorials here too.

Here is a link to the syllabus for the seminar.