USC ARCH 517: Assignments

Full Syllabus

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Seminar Project: A Performance-Driven Skyscraper Algorithm

Students will be involved in an ongoing project to design and document a Grasshopper skyscraper algorithm. The skyscraper algorithm will be driven by various performance criteria that can be categorized under the 4 topics below:

Each week, a new topic will be introduced followed by a step-by-step tutorial. The students will then develop their skyscraper algorithm based on the weekly topic and submit a progress file(s) to the Student Labs before the next class. Students are encouraged to experiment and be creative with their weekly explorations.

For the final product, the students will be responsible for documenting and publishing their work on on their personal page in the Student Labs. The students will create a vignette (diagram, drawing, or rendering) and the final grasshopper file (*.GHX file).

In addition, each student will be assigned one Course Topic and they will provide a detailed process summary (visual and written) of the topic. The students will define the topic and provide process diagrams related to the topic based on their explorations.

The results of the seminar project will be presented to the NBBJ Los Angeles Studio on the final day of class.

Individual Vignette Examples: Example 1, Example 2, Example 3

Course Topic Process Examples: Example 1, Example 2, Example 3, Example 4

Grasshopper Exercises

Exercises are found under the Course Resources and are designed to build the students ability to problem solve and troubleshoot using the Grasshopper plug-in. One of two types of exercise will be issued every week during the course:

  • Debugging Exercises: This type of assignment will challenge the students to fix a Grasshopper definition that is not doing what it is supposed to be doing. This will build the student's competency in reading a definition file and identifying common problems they will run into when working with the plug-in.
  • Problem-Solving Exercises: This type of assignment will challenge the student to build a definition from scratch based on specific criteria. This will build the student's ability to think through conceptual-level problems using the plug-in

Assignment Parameters




Who deserves an A?


