Collegiate Times

The lobby of Cowgill Hall has been transformed into an Amazonian-sized, perfectly geometric spider web.

Hundreds of fishing weights hang from the intricately knotted fishing lines in a network of triangles and squares, ensnaring absent-minded architecture students as they pass through on their way to studio. Nathan Melenbrink, fifth-year architecture student and pioneer of Virginia Tech’s architecture scripting program, is the man behind this snare as he has created a tangible version of scripting, an abstract design program at the School of Architecture and Design.

“Scripting is basically a programing language that is invented within a computer program,”

Melenbrink said. “It allows me to write a code, to do something that this program wouldn’t be able to do normally. I am basically making my own functions so I can design in a way that wasn’t really possible before.”

One floor up in an airy design studio, he searches through his computer files in an attempt to explain this virtual idea in simple terms.

“So I have this top half of a human figure basically of just points and I just wrote this script for each point to make a randomized box around it,” he said, “so I just click on ‘select these points,’ select the box I want to copy and it starts building these boxes around these points.”

The computer screen in front of us rapidly begins filling up with a steadily growing army of small boxes spawning from the script he has written while a complicated compilation of numbers and letters open in another window.

“I could click on the box button and make a couple thousand random boxes but that would be a waste of my time when writing a code can do it,” Melenbrink said as the perfectly uniform boxes march across the screen and quickly swallow the receding figure.

Melenbrink and several of his colleagues are the first students to bring scripting to Tech.

“Nathan and I investigated scripting our third year in school, mostly in the spring semester,” said fifth-year architecture student, Taylor Greenquist. “I’ve known Nathan for three years, through asecond-year studio, and we’ve worked alongside each other on and off ever since. As far as our scripting background, we both printed out gigantic manuals from the Internet, three hole punched them and referred to them quite frequently for the duration of a project in third year.”

Melenbrink is currently teaching workshops on the weekends and working with the university to develop a scripting studio at Tech. He hopes to bring awareness to campus about this tool, which is become very popular in the design world.

“This is used by artists, industrial designers, product designers, engineers. In all of these fields it’s becoming increasingly more important to have skills with writing code,” Melenbrink said. “It’s becoming a very trendy thing in architecture, something that a lot of bigger name architects are becoming interested in.”

Fifth-year architecture student Jeff Stolz explained the advantages of scripting.

“Well the obvious answer is that chicks absolutely dig it,” Stolz said. “But seriously, scripting is a powerful design tool because it allows you to control and manipulate the programs that you design with to a fuller extent. When you become really good at scripting you can make these software do things you wouldn’t have thought possible. It can also cut down on repetitive tasks and allows you to explore a lot more design solutions because it is very easy to make a minor change to a small line of code and completely change the output of your design.”

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