Seminar / Special Topics
Advanced Digital Modeling with Rhino
Advanced Digital Modeling introduced Rhino as part of a larger design and communication workflow.
Students developed 2D and 3D modeling, photorealistic rendering with V-Ray, advanced surface modeling, parametric modeling with Grasshopper, and integration with Adobe software. The course treated technical ability as a means rather than an end: exercises paired new commands with a design premise, a visual narrative, or a problem worth exploring.
The selected archive spans several offerings of the course. The 2020 Powers of Ten work documents remote teaching during the pandemic, while the earlier parametric pods show the longer development of a design-centered approach to digital instruction.
My Approach
A Reason to Move Past the Tutorial
This course gets at the core of how I teach new technical skills. I do not believe students become more capable designers by completing a sequence of dry software tutorials. They learn when a tool is attached to an idea they care enough to pursue, and when experimentation gives them a reason to move beyond the minimum demonstration.
The duck exercise is intentionally simple: model a duck in Rhino and give it a creative context. That small shift opens the work to humor, puns, narrative, product design, image making, and friendly competition. Students still learn NURBS modeling, but the outcomes make the skill memorable and invite each class to build on the imagination of the last.
The parametric pods demonstrate why I resist teaching software apart from design context. Students had to locate a project, articulate a program, generate form, construct parametric logic, render an atmosphere, and explain the relationship among those decisions. A larger vision gave them a reason to work through technical difficulty.
01 | Group
Powers of Ten | Pandemic Edition
A semester-long narrative modeled on the Eameses' movement across scales, developed remotely during 2020 to give a dispersed class a shared story.
The Eames Revolution
A recurring dot pattern connects an island city, quarantine room, modeled virus, and speculative laser cure, demonstrating continuity of visual language across dramatically different scales while integrating urban drawing, interior rendering, parametric modeling, and narrative presentation.
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Eames Revolution city plan
Eames Revolution quarantine room
Eames Revolution virus model
Eames Revolution cure model
COVID-NinetEAMES
COVID-NinetEAMES uses the Eameses' association with play to construct a story of thawed designers, a domestic laboratory, parametric manufacturing, and a rock-paper-scissors cure, keeping technical transitions legible as each scale advances the same visual narrative.
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COVID-NinetEAMES frozen opening
COVID-NinetEAMES quarantine laboratory
COVID-NinetEAMES cure manufacturing
COVID-NinetEAMES virus response
The Pandemic Powers of Ten
This proposal moves from a graphic urban plan to a quarantine interior, a modeled viral form, and a bottle-cap intervention, balancing precise scale changes with a coherent palette and an optimistic final narrative.
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Pandemic Powers of Ten quarantine room
Pandemic Powers of Ten parametric globe
Pandemic Powers of Ten virus model
Pandemic Powers of Ten bottle-cap cure
02 | Group
Parametric Pod
Five inhabitable pods, each locating a program and a landscape condition before resolving form through Grasshopper and paneling tools.
Tree Pod
Tree Pod combines a cantilevered platform with a porous shell wrapped around an existing tree. Paneling logic modulates enclosure and views, while interior and exterior renderings test how the structure mediates between visitor, canopy, and forest floor.
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Tree hero rendering
Tree Pod paneling logic
Tree Pod interior rendering
Tree Pod exterior rendering
Coral Renewal
Coral Renewal proposes a viewing and research pod that also serves as a scaffold for ecological recovery. Grasshopper definitions shape terrain and a porous inhabitable shell, linking parametric form to the long time frame of coral regrowth.
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Coral hero rendering
Coral Renewal Grasshopper terrain
Coral Renewal parametric pod
Coral Renewal exterior rendering
Pilkkiminen
Pilkkiminen adapts igloo geometry into an ice-fishing and northern-lights observatory. A sequence of formal studies, paneling operations, component drawings, and atmospheric renderings makes the relationship between parametric construction and environmental experience explicit.
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Igloo hero rendering
Pilkkiminen formal process
Pilkkiminen paneling tools
Pilkkiminen exterior rendering
Marfa Lights Observatory
The Marfa Lights Observatory frames a distant phenomenon through a reflective desert enclosure. Landscape imagery is translated into a woven facade through Grasshopper, allowing the surface to mirror, filter, and abstract its context.
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Marfa Lights hero rendering
Marfa Lights parametric facade
Marfa Lights open exterior
Marfa Lights interior view
Sno Huset
Sno Huset derives an angular research pod from ice formations and Arctic topography. Paneling and Grasshopper studies resolve a faceted envelope whose sheltered interior and sharp exterior silhouette respond to a severe landscape.
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Sno Huset hero rendering
Sno Huset Grasshopper definition
Sno Huset exterior rendering
Sno Huset interior rendering
03 | Exercise
Playful NURBS Modeling
A shared duck model becomes an open invitation to design, composite, render, and make a visual joke.
Duck Context Exercise
A straightforward NURBS modeling tutorial becomes an invitation to design, composite, render, and make a visual joke. The range of outcomes shows students treating a shared base model as an aircraft, product, mascot, advertisement, film poster, and improbable character. Humor creates permission to experiment while repetition builds technical fluency.
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Airplane duck
Rocket duck
Lunar landing duck
Ducks above the clouds
Conquest duck
Human pond duck
Football duck
Beaks film poster
Culinary duck
Duck phone infomercial
Duck cereal
McDuckin product render
Duck tape dispenser
Student Experience