Architecture is about Beauty. How Blender can help.

[Applause] how's everybody doing I'm going to be talking about architecture is beauty uh my name is Deiter Pushnik I'm from Bulgaria and I'm an architect as you might have guessed by now uh yeah I spent most of my education time well split between the US and the UK uh but most of my professional time in the UK working as on big projects International projects which going to see and the really interesting part about that is that most of it is done with blender which I bet you didn't know that you can do that with architecture design so not architectur visualization but design uh at the moment I run new H Studio which is my own company architecture design practice and I'm really passionate about showing Architects and designers and also TW the artists that are interested in architecture how to use blender as part of their toolkit it so that's one of my massive passions right so yeah let's talk about design so what is design to me probably if I ask all of you you might have a different idea but it's where Beauty and function meet how and how does blender play into this well we'll check out first I want to bring you back with me about too many years ago now like 12 13 at my Postgraduate School it's called the AA School in London it's actually a small school that if you're an architect you probably never heard of it but if you are an architect you definitely heard of it uh and it's I did the design research lab which is a postgraduate mmark program and that thing was super cool as you can see we got down and dirty not only with physical things but also with digital we were doing like all kinds of strange weird scripts with python with processing at that point Point uh with Maya we were playing a lot with physical trying to simulate some things physically and then thinking about how those things could potentially look uh digitally and just going back and forth the whole time uh and so iteration was a really important part of the process and in case you're wondering a lot of these studies were done with Maya with 10 hair back in the day I did use Blender at that point but you know as a student you're like w so many new cookies which one do I take to play with uh but the most important thing that I got from there was experiment iterate evaluate and repeat and I suspect it's probably true for a lot of you even if you're not Architects and designers so let's switch big gears a little bit here so let's talk about beauty so what is beauty all right yeah that's beautiful right beautiful face but uh what is beautiful architecture so this is one of my favorite places in London it's only 5 and 1 half hours from here if you take the Eurostar to St panr station and it's walking distance away from St paner station and it's called the cold drops yard and it's merging old with new and why is it beautiful because it provides an excellent sense of place and ident and it's so you can see the design right it's got like these things the the roof that sort of goes around and the public space that it forms so this is yeah I think I mentioned it heatherwick studio so it's not my project but I absolutely love it because they show the process in their website so I can talk about it because that's the importance right so that's the original image that you see there the satellite photo of two warehouses so this is in a old Industrial area that's you you cannot recognize it anymore because they've completely taken the industry out and now it's a really nice and quite Central Area uh so what was their concept it was creating these called warehouses train warehouses into a really beautiful space church-like space is what they wanted with a dome in the middle so of course they had to iterate a lot to get to that concept and here some of the models that they did and it's quite interesting because you have the concept right their concept was to have a dome in the middle but the design solutions to get to that Dome could be very different right so these all satisfy the design criteria but they chose one and I think they chose the right one and the IT iterative process doesn't stop it continues throughout the design process until we get to the final solution so Cod dropy art make sure you check it out out if you go to London and that process is very important to all of the architectural projects this is another one this is by zaka kadid Architects and it's in Saudi Arabia in Riad so the first image that you see on top that's their winning competition entry which okay it looks great but look where they got to with all the iterations right and it's actually almost built right so it's really fantastic so is that what we call Beautiful functional it I guess yes and uh is this beautiful functionality though well kind of but not really right so uh these are images that I've done which are like for Pavilion but they're for a workshop that I did with some University students a couple of years back and so what how does it how do you separate one from the other right because this does look beautiful um it it's it is a pavilion but it doesn't have like the programmatic requirements so specific criteria that we're trying to generate to to meet that so it's not quite that even though it is quite beautiful so let's get back to this project that you saw in the beginning so this is all designed with blender right so I was a project designer for this project which is not too far from the metro station that I showed you it's in Saudi Arabia as well and so how do you get to this how do you design something like that right because it's got a lot of things going on you see there's people moving it's a landscape AP but you also have some areas in there which are retail spaces some restaurant spaces event spaces and you have to be able to move around from that so that's what I want to talk about is take you in this design Journey with me so first we start with like some simple diagrams to understand the context we have to understand the proximity how we move through there how do we go around and then because we're designing an event space we have to understand what kind of events are happening there uh and that's something that we all designed within our group I was the project designer for this project by the way and so we have to map that out right but this is not quite design it but we really need to understand the spatial parameters the programmatic elements that go in there to generate this kind of criteria so we knew we wanted an event space and we have to test what kinds of sizes work and what we can fit in there and then we have to also think about how do we combine some of these elements together right so if you want to have smaller events we can have like a scenario where we have like one really big event or bunch of really small events so this here this is not designed yet right this is just the criteria to get to the design and what's really fascinating is that these three options here they all they're the the the actual design proposals are quite different but they all satisfy that criteria that you show saw before that right so we this this this is just a fraction of the design proposals that we did for the criteria that you sew and they're all quite different they start out with sketches right and this is where blender comes in so all this was designed with blender and I can't remember now cuz this was about four years back now and when we design I probably had two hours to start with this and eventually you know we go back and we refine and so on so how do you do this in blender so however you can basically right so you find like whatever works for you for the project and what's fascinating about blender is the fact that we can be quite procedural about it so in this case it's not very complicated right so we have like U two sides that were modeled and then we have like a bridge behind it this one was a bit more complicated but again it starts out quite simple and straightforward so create one hexagonal hexagon right so then you create an array in One Direction create array in the other direction you Flo it so it fits the whole site then you use the lattice modifier to deform it so it kind of grows because you can see we have our Bridge which is part of our landscape because it's probably the widest bridge in the world it's it's quite large and then we have to break it down so this was done before geometry nodes four years ago right so if I were to do it now cuz I had to manually start to break it and sort of create like those steps that you see moving around uh probably could have used the tractors to do that with within geometry notes uh and this is the scheme that we said no not with those crazy hats right because they're a bit nuts but uh the idea was to kind of take it down and have like this dun like experience which is more smooth so you sort of flow up the landscape and within there we already as I was designing this we had some specific zones that we were trying to map so there's an event space as you can see restaurant areas and those all had to be designed within the actual landscape and how was this designed so this is the first iteration with some kind of awkward canopies you know copy and paste and that's the more final iteration where you really feel how the bridge you know you have this sort of grit which strips right and then the bridge is almost like flows into the space right and starts to create this really beautiful pattern and you probably guess by now how this is done right so you start with a straight grit and then you get you create some lses to move around and then there's some pieces that they're kind of add on in a quite separate ways I'll show you a snapshot of the model in a little bit so within here we have to satisfy all the design criteria that you saw before and that's the importance of design right we're not just creating 3D for the sake of 3D we're creating 3D with the idea that we're really really understand how this is going to impact our architecture our design once we're done with the basic design we're never done right I mean we're never done we can go on and on and on but within here we have to go back and now look this is just one example of the event space and we want to make sure that the event space works with all the kinds of scenarios that you saw before and Beyond but thinking about it more diagrammatically so that's a very important step sometimes we do it as you see here in diagram form sometimes we do it in 3D with concepts with uh just putting it everything and so we have a better understanding and that's how the project starts to look like right so we have like in this case it looks not so much as a landscape but quite Urban just because of the angle that this image was taken from uh this is not blender by the way we hired a external architectural visualization company called meshroom to do these but I'll show you the ones that I have done with blender also uh so in here you you kind of get like this excitement I think between these two levels and once you see it from different angles then it does start to look more landscape like uh and a funny story here is you see the buildings over there so those buildings somebody and this happens a lot right in architecture offices we had an idea that we're going to put some hotels it's a hotel but if just some blocks because there was no architect for it so we go how about we design something we show it to the client and maybe they'll like it and they'll hire us to do that design as well uh so it's something that was moded in maybe like 1 Hour 2 hours max to be able to do this so there's always this you know okay we we go and we have to design a lot but then sometimes we we have these like really really limited times to be able to design and again that's where blender is is quite important in that design process so that's the snapshot of the model at this point I had worked on it for quite a while so it's not that procedural and a bit hacky right you can probably notice some parts don't flow quite well into it but that's not the important part we don't want to have the absolute perfect topology and the perfect model at all times we want to do whatever we need to do in whichever way to get to the right design solution as quickly as possible and sometimes that requires hacks right so sometimes you know you have to put things on top sometimes you use bullion to move things around you do whatever it is but you try to keep it I try to keep it at least as procedural as possible for as long as possible so we can get you know if we need to move around because we move things around quite a bit easier so that's uh the the wall at at my old architectural office with all the information of what it takes to and actually it's just a part of it you know for you know diagrams references you can see where it says 1 2 3 4 these were like some of the options that you see so in a way software doesn't matter but it does I didn't talk so much about software when I was showing you the design solution but it does help because we can iterate faster and hopefully not always but hopefully more iterations equal better design now I did want to show you here like another super cool project that I use blender for architecture design for which is meant and don't don't tell that to anybody the tallest tower in the world but I can't mention that maybe in 10 years time when it gets built but it's not going to be our concept that gets built somebody else's cuz they had to restart the competition but big ndas and so on anyways I will show you another pretty cool project so this is uh a mixed development this is in Lagos in Nigeria these were also rendered with blender I just do them on the site when whenever I can uh but I really focus more on design but you know being able to present your work is very important as well so in this project we've got hotels we have office we have residential and the two towers one is called Cerulean the other one is indigo they have different characters one one is more Exquisite let's say more refined and the other one is strong Bol and grounded uh and the design is between Rhino and Revit and these are the programs that most Architects tend to use but the facade on the Cerulean one was designed with the help of blender and when we design facades we also have to have specific criteria so how much openings do we need how much do they extrude what do we do with the ends and we always use some references when we do that we also have to consider the different kinds of zones for example a residential facade looks a little bit different different than an office facade you have Terraces whereas in office you don't have Terraces and then we have some public spaces that should probably have a slightly different character as well so this is again just a fraction of the tests that we need to do to get to a good facade solution all done with the help of blender of course with the little bands you know do they go thick and white or you know are they going convex concave concave are they flat but at some point we decide to try having those bands but also connecting them vertically and this in blend this was generated in blender right we have a small chunk with subd then we use the array modifier and then the mirror modifier we always have to make sure within architecture that what we design for the most part although you know my designs even though they're all buildable from what you saw at the moment we still have to have a sanity check right like so how can we panelize this how do we unitize it in order to make it it work and the building is currently in uh construction right and uh not just another render to see what it's going to start looking like and this is how the facade was really built in blender right so we start with one component then it's mirrored then we use one array in One Direction then a second array in another Direction then a lce modifier to deform the two longer sides CU it starts all looking exactly the same and then the curve modifier to put it onto the footprint to deform it around the footprint and then another L is because some of the levels have different uh Heights onto it and then bulling because I needed to remove some parts on top of it so super simple in a way right and you do you guys know this because we you use blender but if you had to do this somewhere else and have such a flexible setup that I need to just go in there and try to move things around that would be extremely difficult in time consuming so blender is probably one of the best design tools for this kind of work and so faster iterations hopefully again for the most part equal more beautiful and sensible design and so we really have to embrace like technology and I you know some people are kind of afraid of Technology probably nobody here right we're all yes blender you know nobody uses it in you know my studio my office whatever I'm going to learn it so I feel like this group here we all really do Embrace technology but you know in The Wider world out there people don't Embrace technology perhaps in the same manner and I think it's really important to play with things and to understand how we can create things even if it's not directly related to a project because at some point it could end up as a project so let me speak a little bit more about that so we've got one aspect so this is a module that repeats basically and this is done with the tissue add-on by the way which you saw the wonderful presentation before uh so it's completely modular and completely parametric so if we were to take this a step further we have something like this which is actually a course that I I've done you can check it out I'll show you the links later in case anybody's interested to do that so that's actually one kind of iteration right for the course to get to something that uh I can teach in four hours but to get to that point there is also iteration so I had to design this three times actually my wife has this Golden Rule she said I tell her it's going to take me 1 hour and she says so I'm going to see you in three hours you know so that's the call so anytime I try to do something it usually takes me 3 hours to do it right so this is a some kind of like a quite interesting water Pavilion and the way it's modeled again is completely uh procedural or parametric is the word word we like to use in architecture essentially procedural uh so it's one chunk that's modeled then it's mirrored and then I'm using a polar array with an empty so basically an array with an empty to create a polar array to fix that to to to sort of have the all the different elements connected so fairly simple procedural setup uh and then as I showed you before I had to go back and sort of simplify this so I can teach it in know forour Workshop to people that have never used blender before so what about smaller scale can you use that and I think the iterative design process criteria driven design process is the same no matter which scale you work in you know you could be working on even a character I suppose right you can be working on a setting on a movie your movie Set you always we always have to refine uh so this is a house that I designed and sometimes I don't know if it ever happens to to you but I had this project sitting around that's what it looked like it's beautiful it's it's actually the S house uh which is designed again well it's just sub I guess in this point and a mirror modifier but then as I was browsing the internet Instagram I so horrible who invent social media I don't know but I guess he has its users as well right uh and at some point I just see a picture and I'm like wow this would be absolutely perfect to go in there but this took at least three times to rebuild as well oh so at one point you know I was feeling a little bit down and I decided and as any architect probably thought about at some point is I want to design my own house maybe we will get built maybe we won't but I want to design it so this took probably 10 iterations starting from scratch to get to a level where I was actually you know comfortable and I said okay now this finally Works U I didn't include too much information but you can check it out on uh my website uh but basically it's based around the golden ratio so all the plant all the spaces they're proportional to to one another and uh I spend a lot of time on the Interiors in here as well to make it work so it's actually I think it's important to show you that because the iterative design process is for all design projects you don't have to have organic geometry to do that sub div based geometry to do it and the Interiors were a a combination of retro futurism with some curves along with Japanese architecture which I'm a big fan of of having you know beautiful Timber slats with light passing through them so again for great design actually software does matter as long as your head is full with good ideas and embracing the design so how do we do that so we we have to keep an eye out outside of design and just start to play with manipulating form and being able to design and work with different form elements I always have an architect's mind so even when I'm doing these massings I'm thinking how can they actually be turned into architecture how do I put floors in there what could the facade look like but most of the time it's just experimenting with different workflows so most of these were done with the tissue add-on which which are just basic tessellations so everything is kept fairly parametric right so we can really manipulate the form as much as we want and you know some of these were done for various different workshops or just for fun to experiment with how we can provide this kind of formal experiments that could potentially like I see them you probably don't but I see them as the possibility of creating buildings with those and if you learn enough of like those little techniques you can sort of combine them to start to create some beautiful massing in this case I I do call it only a massing steel it's not an architectural project because I don't have a criteria to say I need so and so many square meters of this kind of space in there but you can imagine now right this could really easily turn into that and all of these by the way this I have a on on u YouTube a uh video that's showing you exactly how to do this step by step in case you're interested again it's all parametric and done with the tissue add-on but it's got a slightly tricky them the the in this case have to be uh on a diagonal so they have to be designed to be as a diagonal into there so it's really important for me to keep experimenting even outside of projects so when a project does come I feel better equipped to be able to show how that can be actually made and then going back to where we started which was the urban realm you know Amsterdam absolutely beautiful City by the way isn't it because it works so well architecturally you feel out on the street it's quiet it doesn't have cars we have like really nice walls this is a bit different right uh again I'm more of an architect than an architectural visualizer so when I do my visualizations I I'm a little bit lazy so it takes a lot of effort to put this with a in an environment in an urban environment so that's why I put it in the water right uh but this was designed for another course it's more the curved building that you see on the which image is it on that image over there but I thought okay so how do we sort of push what I can do with blender to start to show like the whole context almost in real time this is rendered with Cycles but it can be you know I can manipulate it very quickly because it's quite lightweight and that form it's actually fairly Simply Built you know it's a um subd again my I guess my workflow at this point is a little bit similar I designed a chunk I mirror it and then I rotate you know whether with the Ray I think this this time it was with geometry nodes and then it's using the simple deform modifier to twist it the floors they're one plane arrayed then using the Boolean modifier and then uh extruding down to add a little bit of depth um and some of the other Twisted buildings that you see in this image over here they were done with tissue add-on as well you have a base mass and then you use the tissue add-on so but in here what's important is that blender gives us like this not only a place to design but also place to see what we're designing and put it in a context put people put trees put all the aspects that give you a sense of scale so you understand how you would imagine the space to be and there's some more images of that and yeah so my passion is really about showing Architects and designer how to think about at least to think about how to use blender uh so I teach a summer course as well to University students where it's a bit dictatorial but they must use blender so in my course you know in my unit they have to use blender and it is a challenge you know so these are maybe third or fourth year University students that never used blender before because I'm not only teaching them how to model but I'm also teaching them how to think like Architects right so similar to the design criteria you so for the landscape project before something like that has to occur over here as well uh and on top of that learn how to model that in blender so there's always a little bit of struggle but I think the results are fairly nice and I continue with that uh so yeah that's about it uh so you can check out my projects at uh studio.com uh and I try to collaborate with people as well I'm actually quite interested in movies and seeing like maybe some of these in like a scene or something um and I have a YouTube channel as well which you can check out where oh yeah that's the video that I was talking about with a tesselated digit where you can do it and also some courses um people always ask me whether I use geometry notes which I didn't talk too much about here but I actually have like the Stag building forms is exactly taking like little massings and then understanding how with either with modifiers or with geometry notes we can turn these into architectural Concepts really quickly so thank you so much and thank you to blender and to everybody else that's [Applause] here

Channel: UH Studio Design Academy

Views: 8,632

Keywords: blender, architecture, blenderarchitecture, conceptdesign, concept architecture, architectural design, design, parametric design, non-destructive design, procedural design, parametric, computational, blender architecture, blnder, blender 3d, autodesk maya, architecuture, prametric, parametricism, procedural, parmetric

Id: nSa0wp8hU_g

Length: 28min 52sec (1732 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 01 2023