Günter Barczik

Fachhochschule Erfurt | FHE · Faculty of Architecture and Urban Planning

We introduce direct, versatile and almost tactile techniques for designing topographies and density distributions in architecture and landscape architecture through a sequence of digital 2D drawing and 3D modeling tools. We situate these techniques within the broader context of the growing digital divide between designers and developers of design t...

We present and discuss an experimental student design and research project that investigates how architectural design can be enhanced via immersive technologies. Specifically, by employing not a 2D interface for designers' thoughts, but a 3D interface and thereby activating the whole body instead of merely head and hands.

We present and discuss an experimental student design and research programme in which we investigate the potential of interdisciplinary teams to solve complex design problems. Both students and teachers come from landscape architecture, urban planning and architecture from four different faculties in two different schools in two different cities in...

We are developing an evolutive design tool that seeks to facilitate a shift in the focus of the process of designing architecture: away from the production of design alternatives or options towards an evaluation of semi-automatically generated ones. We work towards outsourcing the production of design alternatives in a given design task to a CAD to...

Wir betrachten jüngere Entwicklungen in der Darstellungsweise räumlicher Situationen in Städtebau und Landschaftsarchitektur. Während die Darstellungen in der Landschaftsarchitektur Freiraumplanung zunehmends photo- bzw. hyperrealisitischer werden und damit der Entwicklung in der Darstellung von Gebäuden folgen, gibt es im Städtebau überraschenderw...

The two geometric operations of intersecting shapes with one another and unfolding complex shapes into flat patterns have through CAD software been changed from challenge to trivi-ality. Thus, combinations of shapes that have eluded designers for the difficulty of their handling are now at the hands of everybody who is able to use common CAD packag...

We present and discuss a didactic for augmenting architectural design education with computational design techniques via integrative feedback loops and show examples of student projects. Our goal is to embed new technical skills into existing design abilities as quickly as possible, in order to enable our students to exploit and explore the extende...

We argue that the prevalence of continuous flat floor surfaces in architecture is comprehensible but fallacious, and that this chimaera can be overcome through studying and employing the sculptural potential of algebraic surfaces which suggest spatial possibilities that enrich designers’ vocabulary enormously. We continue, deepen and extend researc...

We conduct a design research project that radicalizes the relationship between tools and design possibilities: we significantly expand the architectural design vocabulary by employing mathematics and computer science as vehicles for accessing shapes that otherwise would be unthinkable: algebraic surfaces, the zerosets of certain polynomials. Algebr...

We investigate the recent coincidence of rapid global urbanization and unprecedented formal freedom in architectural design and ask whether this coincidence is an uneasy one. To study an extreme case of the new exotic geometries made possible through CAAD, we employ algebraic surfaces to experimentally design architecture in an university-based res...

We present and discuss an experimental architectural student design course which explores the transposition of design techniques and compositional and structural elements from film into architecture with the aim of enriching architectural design.

We present the formalism of relational growth grammars. They are a variant of graph grammars with a principal application for plant modelling, where they extend the well-established, but limited formalism of L-systems. The main property is the application of rules in parallel, motivated by the fact that life is fundamentally parallel. A further spe...

We discuss the creative potential of algorithmic design processes in architecture which use computer-based tools through presenting student work employing these techniques. We propose ways of further amplifying these creative possibilities by employing evolutionary design strategies.

We describe the exploration of the manifold novel shapes found in algebraic geometry and their application in architectural design. These surfaces represent the zero-sets of certain polynomials of varying degrees. They are therefore very structured, coherent and harmonious yet at the same time geometrically and topologically highly complex. Their a...