The first course of parametric design that was held at Alexandria University took place in the faculty of fine arts architecture department under the direction of Prof.Ibrahim Abdel Hady. The course started in Fall 2015 and lasted for two semesters, it focused on strengthening the software skills for a carefully selected number of students, who were taught the principles of Rhino, Grasshopper and 123D maker and method to utilize them in the design process and the final outcome. A competition took place in the last days of the first semester to produce the most suitable pavilion, the students were divided into 15 groups to come up with suitable ideas for the pavilion and to develop their software skills. Along the process, the students dug deeper in the parametric design world and learned other software such as HoneyBee and Diva for Grasshopper among many others. The final product was judged upon three elements; Level of Creativity, The impact of the software on the design and The ability of the design to become a real-life object. Finally, it was agreed to come up with a new design which combines all the students’ ideas, the final product was generated using Rhino and Grasshopper, the units were generated in the form of caps and flaps cut using the laser cutting machine and came together to form the final units. Some optimization first went into the design then somehow the concave plan was changed into a more paralyzed geometry to ensure the stability of the product and to downsize the number of the segments. Further subtraction was done to the actual openings in the design to relief some of the loads. The optimization process’ main goal was to make sure the design is stable and less material consuming. The main problem that the students faced was the complete absence of any laser cutting machines in the faculty and the fact that the material wasn’t available in the market in large quantities of the students’ requested size. The students had to make countless trips to many places to find the material as well as a place to do their laser cutting. A tremendous amount of hard work and sleepless nights went into the making of the pavilion but as Anwar Samy one of the students in the course says “it was all worth it”. Project Info:
Tutors: Prof. Ibrahim Abdelhady, T.A Aya Moussa
Students: Adham Medhat, Ahmed ElGhazoly, Ahmed El khady, Ahmed Hisham, Ahmed Menam, Anwar samy, Asmaa hamdy, Aya Mohamed aly, Aya Osama, Basma Bishir, Dawalt Mansy, Dina ElMazahi, Gasser Youssef, Hadeer hilal, Heba El Hanafi, Jihad AboSeif, Khaleed Maroof, Mohamed el Gohary, Mohamed gamal, Mostafa Ibrahim, Mostafa Hussien, Mahmoud Elsayed, Moaaz ElHoseny, Peter Nabil, Rana Gad, Sherif Ahmed, Yasmin taher, Yousef Yehia.
Material: 130*97*.6 cm Cardboard
Assembly time: 10 Hours
Machining Time: 15 Hours
Number of Units: 230 unique unit
Cost: 750 USD