“We’ve always been interested in the tools used in architecture and have always tried to be critical of these tools,” stated the partners of Aranda/Lasch after being named finalists in MoMA PS 1’s Young Architect Program (YAP) in 2005. “At a certain point we began making our own computational tools and realized that we could make structures that organize space and put forth a way to practice architecture.” Fast forward seven years, and Benjamin Aranda and Chris Lasch continue to pioneer new forms through innovative scripting.

On July 27, Chris Lasch will lead Scripted Facades, a special workshop that is part of AN‘s upcoming conference Collaboration: the Art and Science of Building Facades, taking place July 26-27 in San Francisco.

Lasch co-founded his firm with Benjamin Aranda in 2003, and the duo has made a name for themselves through the deep dives they take into materials and structure for every project, whether a building, installation, or object. In addition to a nod from MoMA PS 1 in 2005 for their YAP proposal The Grotto, Aranda/Lasch won the United States Artists Award and Young Architects Award in 2007, and the same year their practice was the subject of Tooling, part of the Pamphlet Architecture series by Princeton Architectural Press. In 2008, they were featured in the Venice Architecture Biennale (and again in 2010) and also invited back to MoMA to create a large-scale installation in the museum. Since then, they’ve completed a 42,000 square-foot temporary structure for Design Miami in 2009, in addition to working on commercial and residential projects in New York. This fall Aranda and Lasch will both be visiting architecture professors UC Berkeley.

Lasch’s upcoming July 27 workshop on Scripted Facades will offer an intro to creating customized components in Grasshopper through the use of Python scripting. Attendees will be led through a series of tutorials structured as a parametric facade design exercise. This will provide an overview of Python syntax, data management, and script control within the context of Grasshopper’s Python Scripting component. Attendees will learn to build a scripted component, and integrate it within the flow of a Grasshopper definition. To register for this workshop and the preceding July 26 symposium, click here.