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21 projects

The Thoughts

  1. explaining thingsJUL 2026How do you explain a complex, honestly boring technical subject so someone leans in instead of glazing over?
  2. adjacency is not accessJUN 2026A floor plan tells you which rooms touch. It will not tell you which rooms you can actually reach, and the gap between those two drawings is where the architecture is hiding.
  3. buildings that respondJUN 2026Right now a building is a fixed guess. Someone chose the ceiling height and the window size years before you arrived, and you live inside their averaged assumptions whether they fit you or not.
  4. experiences are dataMAY 2026You learned what a room does to you by being in rooms. Nobody sat you down with a dataset.
  5. comfort as dataMAY 2026You don't walk into a room and average your experience. You walk in and the thing that's wrong is the thing you notice: the glare, the echo, the cold draft on the back of your neck.
  6. when the tool scores peopleAPR 2026I build things that give a room a score. The obvious next question, and the one I would ask me, is what happens the day somebody uses that score to decide who gets the room.
  7. latent spaceAPR 2026Machine learning borrowed the word space from us, and I would like to check what it did with it.
  8. drawing as interfaceMAR 2026For most of my life the drawing was the output. You designed the thing, then you drew it to prove it existed.
  9. behavior information modelingJAN 2026For thirty years we've been getting very good at Building Information Modeling: every beam, every duct, every clash, tracked to the millimeter.
  10. heritage meets new techDEC 2025The usual choice with an old building is a trap: treat it as a museum piece no one may touch, or drop a glass-and-steel box in the middle and call it modern.
  11. neuroaestheticsDEC 2025Neuroaesthetics is the unglamorous name for a question everyone already feels: why does one room settle you and another keep you on edge?
  12. evolutionary searchNOV 2025Evolutionary search is what I reach for when a problem is too tangled to solve head on: describe what good looks like, then let a population of designs breed, mutate, and compete until something clever falls out.
  13. physics solversNOV 2025A physics solver is the most honest collaborator I have: it doesn't care what I intended, only what I actually built.
  14. computationOCT 2025Computation is not the same as using a computer, and separating the two took me longer than I would like to admit.
  15. what an llm actually isSEP 2025A large language model is a machine that guesses the next word. That is not me being kind to you, that is the whole thing.
  16. generative aiDEC 2023Generative AI made the inspired gesture free. Anyone can produce a thousand renders before lunch, and a render is a promise, not a product.
  17. extended realitySEP 2022I started in a lab strapping headsets onto students to see whether a lesson lands harder when you can walk around inside it.
  18. connecting the dotsJUN 2020When the art class was asked who here dislikes drawing, mine was the only hand that went up. Awkward.

A Ballooning Market

Can balloons roof a historic market without touching it? A pneumatic simulation. 

TYPEComputation & ResearchTEAMMACAD · SOLOSTACKGRASSHOPPER · KANGAROO · DENDRO · D5LINKSBLOG (opens in new tab)
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WHAT

A historic Cairo market receives a new roof of pressure-packed balloons that borrows the existing steel frame without modifying it. Each balloon is a Kangaroo body with collision, inflation and anchor goals; the settled cluster is meshed with Dendro and lit through CMY membranes in D5.

WHY

A building like Bab al-Luq usually gets offered two futures: a museum piece that can never be touched, or a cold glass-and-steel box dropped in the middle and called modern. Pneumatic parasitism is the third option: a soft new life that hugs the old bones instead of replacing them.

HOW

  1. Trace the frame of Bab al-Luq; mark the nodes that can host anchors.
  2. Seed balloons in the volume; declare radii, no physics yet.
  3. Add collision and inflation goals; anchor the cluster; let the solver settle.
  4. Mesh the settled cluster with Dendro; render daylight through the CMY membranes in D5.

WHAT CAME OF IT

Tuning became the craft: collision too low and the balloons cuddle, too high and they panic. You tune it like a thermostat. And the run where they had no awareness of each other at all, just ghosting through one another in a chaotic, colorful mess? It stayed in the record on purpose, first in the gallery: people read honesty faster than polish.