Mark Burry

University of Melbourne | MSD · Architecture Building and Planning

The precinct-level pedestrian simulation often requires moderate to high-level modelling skills with a steep learning curve, which is usually non-flexible, time-consuming and exclusive of the broader public community. Confronting these problems, our research investigates a novel and agile workflow to test precinct pedestrian behaviours by melding a...

The last three decades have witnessed the explosion of technology and its impact on the architecture discipline which has drastically changed the methods of design. New techniques such as Agent-based modeling (ABM) and Virtual Reality (VR) have been widely implemented in architectural and urban design domains, yet the potential integration between...

Over last two decades, walkability has been increasingly recognised as a pivotal component for urban liveability and sustainability. As a result, facilitating pedestrian-friendly environments is now becoming an urgent need for many urban design and planning projects. This research investigates a computer-aided design strategy to optimise urban form...

70 years ago, Dr Ernest Fooks pointed out that urban vitality is essentially derived from human activity. He came up with a critical recognition that population is the foremost aspect of urban planning, and therefore focused his urban research on population density and its distribution --- in a more demographic perspective. In the book “X-ray the C...

Designing spaces that are entirely unfamiliar in terms of cognitive spatial arrangements present particular difficulties for architects in cases where floor surfaces are not level, for example, walls are not vertical, and ceilings richly sculptured. One such space is presented here as an example of new dilemmas of scale that architects face—the ‘Sa...

Many cities are undergoing rapid urbanisation and intensification with the unintended consequence of creating dense urban fabric with deep ‘urban canyons’. Urban densification can trap longwave radiation impacting on local atmospheric conditions, contributing to the phenomena known as the Urban Heat Island (UHI). As global temperatures are predicte...

Cutting stone by hand to the architect’s precise measurements is an ancient craft using one of the oldest materials known to humankind—traditionally it is a highly laborious undertaking. Curiously the efforts taken to continue constructing Gaudí’s magnum opus long after his death in 1926 included the introduction of 2½D robots to the project in 198...

This paper discusses the challenges that designers face when modelling the anticipated behaviours of people: their movement and transactions around and within precinct scale development. Building Information Modelling (BIM) software philosophy contrasts with that of City Information Modelling (CIM)—the route by which we consider how precinct scale...

Urban futures are typically conceptualized as starting anew; an urban future is usually represented as a quest for an ideal state, replacing the status quo with visionary statement about ‘better’ futures. Repeatedly, propositions reinvent the way we live, work and play. The major urban innovations for the changing cityscape from the last 100 years,...

This paper describes a virtual and physical design and prototyping strategy intended to aid designers to understand the relational dynamic between airflow and porous screens for building facades at the conceptual design stage. The strategy consists of three main components: 1) A prototyping phase involving a combination of computer aided modeling (...

English translation of the journal article "用于热性能反馈的多模概念设计工具包", in 住区 (Community Design), Vol. 2013, 6, 21-29, 中国建筑工业出版社

Digital workflows spanning from the design to the production of buildings and small installations have received significant recent attention in architectural research [1]. The structuring of these workflows is important for facilitating design collaboration. The successful delivery of ‘non-standard’ projects, with free-form geometries and novel fab...

The evaluation of a low-tech wind sensing platform for urban aerodynamic simulations relevant to pedestrian comfort. In this paper, the wind canyon effect is simulated with two different building morphologies. The platform provides conceptual knowledge of the dynamics in wind relevant for designers, architectural practitioners and students of desig...

This paper presents an experimental study on strategies of utilizing wind as an architectural element, proposing the reconfiguration and projection of wind patterns to produce vaults of wind as regions of shelter in the outdoor environment. It shows an aerodynamic analysis and exploration of barriers, deflectors and porous screens in an existing ur...

Mark Burry holds a unique position in architecture, straddling the worlds of practice and academia as Senior Architect to the Temple Sagrada Família in Barcelona and as Professor at RMIT in Melbourne, where he is Founding Director of the RMIT Design Research Institute. In his Counterpoint to this issue of AD, he puts the spotlight back on construct...

Many architects and engineers regard BIM as a disruptive force, changing the way building professionals design, build, and ultimately manage a built structure. With its emphasis on continuing advances in BIM a research, teaching, and practice, Building Information Modeling: BIM in Current and Future Practice encourages readers to transform disrupti...

This paper presents the experimental study of aerodynamics phenomena in built environments, focused on explorations of environmental wind flow near buildings, pedestrian wind comfort issues and methods of mitigation of wind speed. In addition, it is an overview of an aerodynamic analysis with CFD software for a hypothetical urban shelter design, ba...

This paper presents a multimodal toolkit for rapid performance-driven façade design that includes both virtual and physical performance feedback. The toolkit has been user tested in the SmartGeometry 2013 event by the Thermal Reticulations workshop cluster. Although the workshop participants were predominately digital design focused, the authors ob...

This paper documents the flexible automated digital design for production workflow utilized for the materialization of the FabPod Project, together with the use of an integrated practice methodology and highly collaborative process. The research seeks to narrow the divide between the acts of designing and the acts of making, by integrating through...

Digital workflows from the design to the production of buildings have received significant recent attention in architectural re-search. The need for both integrated systems for design collaboration (Boeykens, 2006) and clear and flexible communication flows for non-standard fabrication outcomes have been identified as fundamen-tal (Scheurer, 2010)....

When Greg Lynn embraced digital animation software in the 1990s, he not only redefined architectural production, but also the designer's relationship to the generative process. In this extract from an unpublished essay written in 2000, the philosopher Brian Massumi describes Lynn's ‘in‐folding’ open‐ended approach, which renders the design process...

Guest‐Editor Pia Ednie‐Brown provides a foil to Mario Carpo's discussion of digital innovation. She argues for an emerging ‘strange vitality’ in contemporary computational design that is highly innovative: being disruptive rather than incremental in the manner in which it seeks out innovation. She specifically describes how MOS (Michael Meredith an...

The bald desire to innovate is not sufficient in itself. To go beyond mere technical invention and make a positive difference, innovation requires an engagement with overall ethical intent. Here, Guest‐Editor Pia Ednie‐Brown espouses a design ethos that values an open‐ended approach to architectural innovation. She illustrates the ethical impact of...

Abstract‘To strive for a culture framed on great design is itself a fundamental innovation imperative.’ Here, Guest‐Editor Mark Burry poses the difficult question of how innovation might be achieved at a wider cultural level. How can society effectively seek to demand great design with confidence and authority? Burry looks specifically at the role...

An event and exhibition space opening on to the sidewalk of New York City's SoHo, Storefront is dedicated to the advancement of innovative positions in architecture and design. It seeks ‘to simultaneously shake and question the current state of affairs’. Guest‐Editor Pia Ednie‐Brown discusses with the Catalan architect, Eva Franch i Gilabert, her r...

Estonian architect Veronika Valk of Zizi&Yoyo provides a manifesto for contemporary practice, based on ‘architecture as initiative’; initiative being defined as the basic catalyst for change in a project, whether it is a small‐scale art installation or an urban development. As self‐contained ideas factories, initiatives generate ‘open and affirmati...

Antoine Picon, Professor of the History of Architecture and Technology at Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), and the author of a significant new book, Ornament: The Politics of Architecture and Subjectivity (John Wiley & Sons), publishing in April 2013, provides the counterargument to this issue. He argues that for innovation to go beyond the...

Artists and researchers Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr of SymbioticA, based at the School of Anatomy, Physiology and Human Biology at the University of Western Australia, are internationally renowned as pioneers in the field of biological arts, challenging audiences with their tissue engineering projects. Catts and Zurr discuss how synthetic biology has...

In the last decade, biotechnical architecture has become one of the most fertile areas for speculative architecture. Guest‐Editor Pia Ednie‐Brown traces the recent lineage of this field, highlighting the work of Ginger Krieg Dosier and Michael Dosier of Vergelabs, which has pushed biotechnical architecture further towards actualisation; their compa...

Cities, and their component buildings and infrastructural systems, have developed rapidly in responsive and adaptive capacities. Ubiquitous computation and new informational technologies are increasingly embedded in the physical and social processes of the city. Here, Michael Weinstock identifies ‘sentience’, or the ability to be aware, as the prim...

Chair to the Australian government's Review of the National Innovation System in 2008, Terry Cutler is an industry consultant and strategy advisor with a background in the information and communications technology sector. Here, he opens up the question of architectural innovation to the wider context of the economy and social need. If architects ar...

New York‐based artists Shusaku Arakawa (1936–2010) and Madeline Gins (1941–) used architecture in their work in an approach that they have referred to as ‘architecting’. Jondi Keane explains how as artists‐turned‐architects, Arakawa and Gins have not been particularly interested in innovating architecture, but in approaching architecture as a way t...

Abstract‘Completion is both essential for, and antithetical to, innovation.’ Here, Gretchen Wilkins and Guest‐Editor Andrew Burrow attempt to resolve this generative paradox by going in search of ‘open‐to‐ending strategies in architectural practice’. They advocate the model of the ‘final draft’ in the design process as a means to bringing a project...

Architectural historian and theorist Mario Carpo examines the status quo of digital innovation. Whereas the espousal of animation software in the 1990s placed architects conspicuously at the forefront of new technologies as early adopters and adapters, in the new millennium they have less enthusiastically embraced the participatory opportunities of...

Japan‐based architect and academic Tom Daniell puts out a call to architects, beseeching them not to lose sight of their role as creative inventors. Rather than being diverted into despair by the present confluence of ecological, economic and political crises, architects should be providing much needed optimism, thinking beyond the current situatio...

One of the most influential figures in architectural education and practice today, Leon van Schaik, Professor of Architecture (Chair of Innovation) at RMIT in Melbourne, has dedicated the last two decades of his career to the promotion of local and international architectural culture through design practice research and the commissioning of buildin...

Architectural innovators often work on the cusp of what is feasible, acceptable and convincing. Practising futuristically can also mean risking going down a blind alley. Over the last two decades, Greg Lynn has been one of the leading figures in innovative practice, demonstrating an instinct for the meaningfully inventive. One of his major contribu...

This early research focuses on the design of building façades to mediate external and internal thermal conditions. It explores new workflow for accessible feedback into the early design of façade systems. Specifically, this research aims to explore the level of corroboration or the gap between predictions of thermal behavior using digital modeling...

This research explores the potential for developing responsive composite materials with sensing, kinetic and luminous capacity for application in the design of responsive architectural morphing skins. We integrate sensing devices and building skin as one 'integrated' entity, eliminating the need to embed discrete components in a vulnerable system....

The research project that induced the Dermoid (Fig.1) installation investigates the making of digital tools by which architects and engineers can work intelligently with material performance. Working with wood as a material, we were especially interested how the bend and flex of wood, can become an active parameter in the digital design process. Tr...

This paper describes the development of a design and prototype production system for novel structural use of networked small components of wood deploying elastic and plastic bending. The design process engaged with a significant number of different overlapping and interrelated design criteria and parameters, a high level of complexity, custom compo...

Advances in computational techniques allow for the integration of simulation in the initial design phase of architecture. This approach extends the range of the architectural intent to performative aspects of the overall structure and its elements. However, this also changes the process of design from the primacy of geometrical concerns to the nego...

TheResponsive Acoustic Surfacesworkshop project described here sought new understandings about the interaction between geometry and sound in the arena of sound scattering.This paper reports on the challenges associated with modelling, simulating, fabricating and measuring this phenomenon using both physical and digital models at three distinct scal...

Modularisation is a well-known method of reducing code complexity, yet architects are unlikely to modularise their visual scripts. In this paper the impact that modules used in visual scripts have on the architectural design process is investigated with regard to legibility, collaboration, reuse and design modification. Through a series of thinking...

Emerging from the challenge to reduce energy consumption in buildings is the need for energy simulation to be used more effectively to support integrated decision making in early design. As a critical response to a Green Star case study, we present DEEPA, a parametric modeling framework that enables architects and engineers to work at the same sema...

With the onset of fully fledged file-to-factory design techniques, why should architects want to restrict themselves to the prescribed limits of descriptive geometry? In this article Mark Burry looks at a specific set of geometries - doubly ruled surfaces - that have been most explicitly developed by ‘structural artists’ Antoni Gaudí, Vladimir Shuk...

Presently collaboration is difficult on complex parametric models, in part due to the illegibility of unstructured parametric schemata. This lack of legibility makes it hard for an outside author to understand a parametric model, reducing their ability to edit and share the model. This paper investigates whether the legibility of a parametric model...

Over the past six decades, the notion of tensegrity has prompted significant research in the fields of structural engineering and architecture. Tensegrity is of interest to architects and engineers wishing to explore lightweight and rapidly deployable structural solutions for non-standard architectural forms. Despite thorough investigation by a var...

Decisions made in the earliest stage of architectural design have the greatest impact on the construction, lifecycle cost and environmental footprint of buildings. Yet the building services, one of the largest contributors to cost, complexity, and environmental impact, are rarely considered as an influence on the design at this crucial stage. In or...

The work of Antoni Gaudí (1852–1926), in “returning to the origin ” to find originality draws on natural precedent for the relationship of growth and its influence on form. This seems to test the relationship of mathematics and geometry to the living reality of combined second order hyperbolic surfaces more than that of any other architect. The des...

The evolutionary structural optimization (ESO) method evolves a structure from the full design domain towards an optimum by gradually removing inefficient material. The bi-directional ESO (BESO) may start from any initial design and evolve a structure to an optimum by adding and removing material simultaneously. In this paper, a detailed comparison...

The investigation presented in this paper focuses on the following questions: How can engineering and architectural expertise, assisted by a process of digital optimisation, promote structural awareness regarding design alterations in the conceptual design stages? Can building geometry be set up computationally to render it sensitive to structural...

This paper presents research on the relationship between digital tools and design communication, focussing on the interaction between architectural and lighting design. Early design integration often involves negotiating between different levels of resolution to inform a design that is still in formation, and part of the challenge is doing so in a...

This paper describes a design studio that investigates the possibility of defining space beyond conventional perceptions of space, movement and interaction. Drawing from recent writing on hertzian space, a condition that transcends physically constructed boundaries, connectedness between overlapping fields of occupation and activity are used to gen...

In this paper, a new algorithm for bi-directional evolutionary structural optimization (BESO) is proposed. In the new BESO method, the adding and removing of material is controlled by a single parameter, i.e. the removal ratio of volume (or weight). The convergence of the iteration is determined by a performance index of the structure. It is found...

The development of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research is not undisciplined but rather demands conscious and rigorous attention to developing appropriate research questions, approaches, methods, and theoretical frameworks. In 2005, researchers in the Spatial Information Architecture Laboratory (SIAL, RMIT University) initiated an innov...

This paper discusses a practice-based research that is developing through the pedagogical approach of 'embedding' doctoral students within the context of professional architectural practice. In this pilot study, the students research not only as observers, but as active participants in the design process, introducing research tools for communicatio...

Professor Mark Burry's extraordinary and devoted work is nothing short of a measure by which standards for architectural research are set. Known for his investigative use of computational techniques to unravel the mysteries of Gaudí's Sagrada Família Church, he here takes a moment to reflect on where computational technologies in architecture are t...

Collaborative design activity that involves remote multilateral, multidisciplinary communication has become more commonplace with the electronic means to communicate across any distance in real time. The communication itself can be both an important repository of project information and an important part of the process of conceptualisation and desi...

In this paper, we discuss recent developments in the ongoing implementation of a toolkit for developmental generative design and form-finding. We examine tissues of face-centered cubically close-packed voxel cells and topologically related structures for the possibility of 3D data conversion and of rapid prototyping applications. We also demonstrat...

This paper demonstrates the effectiveness of the Evolutionary Structural Optimization (ESO) method in developing conceptual forms of complex structures. A three-dimensional ESO computer code has been developed which is capable of analysing and optimizing structures of any geometries and loading conditions. The technique has been tested on a wide ra...

Besides its clinical applications, various researchers have shown that EMG can be utilised in areas such as computer human interface and in developing intelligent prosthetic devices. The paper presents results from a preliminary study. The work describes the outcome in using an artificial neural network (ANN) to recognise and classify human speech...

This paper looks at examples of successful transdisciplinary design projects that oblige a departure from the typical assertion of sub-discipline distinctions. In doing so a case is made for a new convergence between architectural design education, research and practice. A case for post digital design will also be made, defined here as the comprehe...

This paper reports on the development of a unique software prototype that combines digital information spaces with sound and intelligent agent support. This prototype is innovative in its use of digital space as a mechanism for arranging image based information for presentation scenarios. Working with a spatial approach to digital environments, thi...

Computer Mediated Communication Abstract: Collaborative design activity that involves remote multilateral, multidisciplinary communication has become more commonplace with the electronic means to communicate across any distance in real time. The communication itself can be both an important repository of project information and an important part of...

This paper will report on a generative performative modeling approach that engages architects and structural engineers in close dialog. We focus on knowledge shared between architects and engineers to apply the Finite Element Analysis based structural design technique Evolutionary Structural Optimization [ESO] as a way to understand or corroborate...

Design is a fundamentally collaborative activity. It commonly calls on a wide range of expertise and is arguably most effective when all contributions can be considered from an early and highly conceptual phase of the process. The sharing of information, particularly in a process that, at its best, involves collective conceptualisation is complicat...

This paper presents a comparison study of the existing methodologies for the conversion of images to sounds and determines the suitability and reliability of these techniques of data mapping. It also discusses enhancements that are needed to improve these mapping techniques. Many people have tried image-to-sound mapping or data-to-sound mapping and...

This paper presents a new approach for image to sound mapping. The proposed method utilizes the music parameters such as pitch and rhythm to support translation of images into sounds. Many people have tried image-to-sound mapping or data-to-sound mapping and failed to prove the useful results and many people haven't followed the principles of psych...

While the environmental impacts of the clothing sector are small in absolute terms, the relative impact of upstream supply chain is significant. Consequently, it is important to be able to assess the indirect environmental impacts occurring upstream through the supply chain. However, due to the complexity of the supply chain in terms of process and...

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This paper summarises the development of a machine-readable model series for explaining Gaudı́'s use of ruled-surface geometry in the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, Spain. The first part discusses the modeling methods underlying the columns of the cathedral and the techniques required to translate them into built structures. The second part discusse...

This paper summarises the development of a machine-readable model series for explaining Gaudi's use of ruled surface geometry in the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, Spain. The first part discusses the modeling methods underlying the columns of the cathedral and the techniques required to translate them into built structures. The second part discusses...

In this paper we discuss recent developments in the ongoing implementation of a toolkit for developmental generative design and form finding. We examine tissues of face-centered cubically close-packed voxel cells and topologically related structures for the possibility of 3D data conversion and of rapid prototyping applications. We also demonstrate...

We speculate on a possible CAAD future that deploys and extends paradigms of natural growth and cellular development to an extent that would allow the planting and growth of man-made structures. This approach is based on the translation and expression of digital data structures into artificial physical form and the building of structures by decentr...

As a first manifestation of a recently launched international research project, this position paper outlines an approach to use ontologies as a means to tame the high degree of complexity involved in most collaborative (architectural) design projects which derives from the involvement of their numerous participants. Traditionally, these various inv...