Course Objectives: integrating digital operational strategies into a design method. Commanding the ability to fluidly navigate through a vast array of virtual applications, design media, and digital fabrication technologies, affords incredible potential to develop, test, produce and communicate both spatial ideas and their corresponding physical components with great clarity. This course is designed to provide a fundamental introduction to three-dimensional digital modeling for architectural representation and fabrication using Rhinoceros 3d - a NURBS surface modeling program. We will intensively focus on a specific region within this array: design strategies / techniques used by contemporary architects as a way to organize and test operational strategies used in digital design process through the use of complex NURBS constructs developed, and refined in digital tools introduced in this course

Geometry lies at the core of the architectural design process. It is omnipresent, from the initial form-finding stages to the actual construction. While design and geometry share a fundamental interest in form and shape, Descriptive and Computational Architectural Geometry aims to address the various natures of the historical relationship between mathematics, geometry, computation, and architecture. Through the display of historical mathematical models with formal affinities to contemporary architectural production, the course will provoke discussion about the relevance of a history of form, the origins of design technique, the epistemology of geometry models, and the justification for mathematical surfaces in architecture. This course examines the history, theory and practice of parallel (orthographic) and central (perspective) projection. The primary objective is to provide designers with the tools to imagine and represent with precision, dexterity, and virtuosity a continually expanding repertoire of three-dimensional architectural form.