PARAMETRIC THINKING AND INNOVATION IN URBAN DESIGN

IMAGE ABOVE: Axial map of the central area of London, created to analyze the paths inside the city

At Hugh Dutton Associates we have recently worked on the relationship between parametric design and urban planning. Last year we coordinated the workshop Smart Cities in Turin and we published on this blog some studies about Participatory Sensing and Urban Data Visualization by Sara Alvarellos and Fran Castillo. Today we share an academic research by Andrea Galli, a young architect we met in Turin on the occasion of our lecture PARAMETRIC DESIGN /// COMPLEX GEOMETRIES /// NEW TECHNOLOGIES.

IMAGE ABOVE: Econnected City, urban design for Damasco, Ergin Birinci & Rocky Merchant

Andrea Galli »s  research focuses on parametric design and its applications on urban design.
Here is an abstract of the thesis.
In the last decades we have seen a wide development of computer technologies applied to architectural design.
The first CAD (Computer Aided Design) software that architects ad engineers have been using since the ’90s are now fused on BIM (Building Information Modelling) technologies, resulting in tools that give the possibility of a total control on the project.
The evolution of this kind of software, called parametic, has showed such a wide horizon that nowadays the attention is focused not only on the descriptive process but also on the generative one: influencing the evaluation of the building site’s characteristics and potentiality, the material’s choice, and moreso the compositive phase.

This thesis is a comparison of some of the main “parametric” software and a study of the implications of the new approach that Patrick Schumacher (Zaha Hadid Architects) calls Parametricism, defining it as best online casino the new architectural style after modernism. The way that it is changing Urban Design, in particular, is analysed through three projects that belong to  deeply different realities, reaching  interesting reflections on  how the architect should use at the best the new technologies in his hands.

IMAGE ABOVE: Econnected City, study of the main winds influencing the project »s area, and behavior of the air current into design proposal

Andrea is a Master student in Building Engineering at Politecnico di Torino and he got a B.Sc. at University of Messina in 2011 with a final thesis on « Parametric Architecture and Urbanism ». His interests are focused on computational approach to architectural field and he attended advanced workshops on Grasshopper and its plugins.
Andrea worked in London at Urban Future Organization from April 2010 to July 2010, where he grounded his knowledge on parametric tools for architectural design.