The weekly workshop “Articulating Urban Complexities” investigates the use of parametric design tools for urban design. The exercise addresses contemporary computational challenges in urban design in order to provide students with practical knowledge in the field of architecture.
Various parametric design and analysis tools as well as urban design proposals are developed during the workshop. The work on the design project is mainly performed using the Grasshopper plug-in for Rhino. Students learn how to build Grasshopper definitions from existing components. In order to meet specific urban design requirements, students also learn how to create custom Grasshopper components using the C# programming language.
For the production of images, the VRay rendering plug-in for Rhino is used in conjunction with Grasshopper in order to create rendered animations to emphasize the parametric nature of the designs.