Motivation & vision

As a research platform on parametric urban design at Middle East Technical University (METU), Ankara, METU PUD was initiated with the elective course, UD555 Parametric Urban Design, in 2014. The program currently engages in education and research on the field of parametric urban design at METU Faculty of Architecture, Turkey.

As an emerging field positioned within the larger domain of computational design, parametric urbanism calls for further researches combining the ever-developing technology of parametric models and the cotemporary theory of urban design. From that perspective, METU MUD aims to search for providing new answers to the old problems by the application of innovative techniques into the wicked question of designing good spatial forms for the city of future. To that end, the program suggests a collective research environment via courses, workshops and dissertations in addition to lectures and exhibitions to enhance the increasing interest in parametric design and urbanism.

Vision

Development in complexity science flourishing a clear insight on emergent systems require associative and rule-based control systems while offering strong potentials to challenge the conventional views on spatial planning and design. In many fields, this motivates designers to conceive the forms and patterns not in terms of their final geometry, but with reference to their intrinsic generative rules and structures implying the knowledge of algorithm. In this context, as a form of algorithmic design, parametric modelling suggests a wide array of morphological variations within a controlled framework. Already having gained a wide area of application in architectural design, parametric modelling has been becoming a part of research agenda in urbanism in the name of ‘parametric urban design’.

Acknowledging the fact that any effective innovation in practice is only led by systemic research, METU PUD tends to create a methodological link between computational design and urban design by using the basic tools and techniques of parametric modelling.  Performing as an active research community open to both planning and architecture, the program aims to integrate the already established logics of computational design in architecture into the context of urban design with graduate level education and research. From this perspective, the course sets its main objectives as follows:

  • introducing the students to the emerging techniques of algorithmic design through the advanced morphological knowledge of urban design by using the computational domain of parametric modelling,
  • providing students with a clear understanding and operational and insight of complexity in urbanism by experimenting the parametric tools to simulate and control urban form algorithmically.