We have released the recordings for the final presentation with the amazing student works from the “Reactive Miniverse” workshop led by Andrew Friedenberg, the American architect and computational designer at Heatherwick Studio, and Hamze Machmouchi, an architectural designer and researcher at Zaha Hadid Architects. The “Reactive Miniverse” workshop was hosted by PAACADEMY and kicked off on 25th June 2022 over 9 weeks. The Reactive Miniverse workshop questions the future of digital spaces as spatial, cultural, entertaining, and educational experiences. Students learn to generate complex architectural geometries and implement and explore them within game engines to create interactive and kinetic environments. This playful process aims to develop design and software skills, notably in Unreal Engine 5, Rhino3D, and Grasshopper. You can register and watch the recordings of the workshop from this link.
In the “Reactive Miniverse” workshop, the students explored the design of different typologies of digital space by creating unique assets for implementation in Unreal Engine using Rhinoceros 7 and Grasshopper. Specifically, they looked at SubD modeling in Rhino 7, covered Grasshopper fundamentals, and made more complex geometries using additional plugins like Kangaroo for form-finding and Dendro for more organic geometries. The students were able to learn and digest a good amount of knowledge about Rhino3D, Grasshopper, and Unreal Engine. After this, they had two weeks to prepare for their final presentation.
The jury day and final presentation were held on 27 August 2022 as an open-to-public event. Many people joined the event as we had an amazing and inspiring jury guests, Stephen Hopkins, the multidisciplinary designer and the clothing brand part/WHOLE owner. We also invited the amazing teacher in PAACADEMY, Mariana Cabugueira, a Portuguese architect and urban designer and former senior architectural designer at Zaha Hadid Architects. Another amazing jury member was Edward Meyers from the Computational and Design Research Group at Zaha Hadid Architects (CODE). The last jury member was Aldo Sicilia, an architectural designer who was previously the project lead architect for the Atrio Towers.
