Join us in San Francisco for an inspiring summer of experimentation and making. Discover the poetics of digital fabrication to create Performative Ornaments. Push your creative boundaries, transform digital ideas into tangible forms, and produce portfolio-worthy work to showcase your design skills.

Who can join? Anyone excited about digital fabrication who meets the prerequisite of Rhino knowledge.

Already an Academy of Art student? Shorten your time to graduation. You may be eligible to substitute a studio (ARH 609 or ARH 608). Please check with your Academic Advisor.

Prerequisite: ARH 653, ARH 654, Department Director Approval (knowledge of Rhino is required)

Software Used in the Course: Rhino, Grasshopper, Adobe Creative Cloud (provided for students)

• Bring digital concepts to life by fabricating and assembling precise scaled models and prototypes of a modular architectural design.
• Develop a digital-to-physical workflow by creating efficient digital models to generate, test, optimize, and physically manifest your ideas.
• Bridge the gap between code and craft, grounding your computational design logic directly in material properties, structural behaviors, and physical fabrication realities.
• Design with algorithmic fluidity, developing iterative, parametric workflows that evolve a single module into a cohesive spatial field.
• Collaboratively fabricate, establishing workflows to manage shared files, coordinate workshop sequencing, and collectively troubleshoot the physical assembly of multipart prototypes.
• Tell a compelling architectural story by communicating intent through physical models, photography, exploded axonometric, architectural drawings, diagrams, visualizations, and a clear articulation of Grasshopper logic and modular thinking.
• Anchor creativity in evidence, systematically documenting the parameter-based design decisions and iterations that lead to the final project.

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