Participation in CAADRIA 2022 : Post Carbon

This 27^th International Conference of the Association for Computer-Aided Architectural Design Research in Asia (CAADRIA) will take place from the 9^th to the 15^th of April in Sydney, Australia. The conference aims to take on the increasingly urgent question of carbon impact, whose consequences are already being felt worldwide through climate change, ocean acidification, floods, fires, cyclones, air pollution and its associated rise in lung diseases, and a host of other negative effects.

Organisers of the conference hope to tackle how computation can improve the quality, sustainability, and resilience of the built environment. In accordance with this thematic, submitted papers were asked to address the UN Sustainable Development Goals, and a focus was set on how to create a different approach and find effective ways to apply computational design, simulation, analysis, fabrication and management to architecture and construction, allowing for closer collaborations and better dialogues, in order to reach towards diminishing carbon impact. In alignment with current carbon footprint goals, participation in the conference is possible online.

Design your own timber structure with CAD and robotics

Aryan Rezaei Rad and Nicolas Rogeau submitted a paper titled “A Collaborative Workflow to Automate the Design, Analysis, and Construction of Integrally-Attached Timber Plate Structures” and will be teaching an associated workshop (n°13, on CAADRIA registration website), by the end of which participants will have the chance to apply what they have learned by designing their own, personalised timber plate structure using the provided framework. In order to do this, participants will first discover how merging traditional craft with advanced digital fabrication processes can lead to more sustainable building techniques, and how computational design tools can enhance cooperation and knowledge exchanges between architects and engineers.

The first part of the workshop will introduce the manipulation of both standard and bespoke timber plate structures. Then, integrated digital fabrication processes, i.e. CNC machining constraints and robotic assembly considerations will be presented. For the engineering design and simulation part, COMPAS_FEA, an extension of the COMPAS framework, will be employed. COMPAS is a state-of-the-art computational platform that enables a trans-disciplinary collaboration between architects, engineers, and contractors. This workshop will be given online, on the 9^th of April, from 10am to 6pm CET and requires basic knowledge of Rhino and Grasshopper. Participation in all workshops is free for registered conference participants, and you will be asked which workshop you would like to attend as part of your registration process.

An open-access, open-source, open-build point-cloud processing tool

Petras Vestartas’s and Andrea Settimi’s paper is titled "Cockroach: an Open-source Tool for Point Cloud Processing in CAD". It introduces Cockroach, which creates a link between computer-aided design (CAD) modeling software and low-level point cloud processing libraries. So far, it has proved to be a handy design tool in integrating building components with unpredictable geometries such as raw wood or mineral scraps into new design and industrial fabrication processes. This allows for the creation of innovative structures which fully utilize irregular elements, allowing for a much greater sustainability factor and lower carbon impact through, along with other applications, diminishing waste.

Cockroach is a truly open-access, open-source, open-build tool aiming to make point-cloud processing possible for everyone, including designers who cannot work directly with code but would like the range provided by high-end computational design tools. Given the rising need for using recycled, non-standard elements, high-level point cloud processing could prove to be a valuable asset for sustainable computational design. Existing point cloud processing tools are still not user-friendly and the only available solutions are stand-alone software applications.

Cockroach started from concrete research goals for robotic fabrication of irregular timbers and mineral scraps, then was developed to be used in several software packages such as Rhinoceros3d and Grasshopper. It hopes to offer a structured, well-documented, and maintained open-source tool. Regarding future developments, it aims to extend the usability of the software to a broader public of users from different disciplines. This format may allow other high-level users than AEC designers to profit from intuitive but effective point cloud processing.

Early bird sales for the conference end on the 19^th of March.