LIBRA workshop at SIMAUD 2022

On July 17th, Ioannis Mirtsopoulos and Jonas Warmuth (Structural Xploration Lab) are organizing a workshop on Policy-based exploration of equilibrium representations (PEER): A topology grammar for generative conceptual structural design. Building upon Ioannis' freshly-defended PhD thesis, LIBRA, a Grasshopper plugin for Rhino3D, will be released and shared among participants. The 6-hour workshop is part of SIMAUD 2022, the Symposium on Simulation for Architecture and Urban Design.
The tool allows the incremental generation of numerous diverse reticulated conceptual structures in a semi-automated way within predefined design domains and for predefined loads without any knowledge of structural mechanics. In particular, it provides an easy and intuitive workflow for structural design, beneficial to understand how the flow of forces affects the design of structures. The integration of static equilibrium conditions ensures designers that the generated design candidates are always in static equilibrium and no further post-processing to impose equilibrium is required.
This design workflow aims at provoking creativity. Additionally, it deals with structural design and structural performance, which can optionally be optimized if the designer/user wishes so. Overall, it is a generative, algorithmic and evolutionary design approach that integrates interactive genetic algorithms and aims to unveil unprecedented structural forms. Multiple SimAUD themes tackle with creativity, structural design and generative/evolutionary design and therefore we are convinced that the SimAUD community perfectly matches the target group of the developed plug-in. In particular, the workshop targets architects with interest in conceptual structural design. During the workshop the theory of the generative grammars that support the workflow will be provided. After, the participants will be guided for the generation of 2D and 3D structurally valid design candidates.