Parametric Staggered Building Forms

Architectural massing strategies to iterate procedurally and create architectural concepts

In this course, you will learn specific strategies for generating numerous architectural massings with ease.

You will achieve this new knowledge by creating massings and concepts for a staggered building, mimicking the typical design ideation process that most professionals and students utilise for early stages of projects.

The goal of this course is to equip you with a series of workflow strategies that enable you to ideate and bring more of your ideas out more quickly and effectively.

At a glance: Learn a multi-step concept design workflow for generating staggered architectural massings, and developing them into presentable concepts
Topics: procedural parametric modeling, architectural modeling, Geometry Nodes, tessellations with the Tissue add-on
Software: Blender
Duration: 3 hours worth of lessons of recorded sessions,  + live Q&A sessions. Videos include english subtitles.
Preview: You can freely access the first lessons of the course below in the curriculum
Experience: Covers up to intermediate topics. Suitable for beginners. Basic Blender understanding preferred
Includes: Video lessons, Blender files, and assignments
Your instructor: Dimitar Pouchnikov, AIA, professional architect in London with over 12 years experience working on international projects, Full Bio below

Part 1  - Massings
You will learn how to create quick massings both non-destructively and destructively in edit-mode. You will learn multiple procedural workflows that allow instant adjustments of massings without having to manually redo work. These workflows will empower you to quickly and easily adopt and modify massings, replicating the typical contextual, programmatic, team, or client-based adjustments that drive the design evolution.

The procedural workflows encompass techniques utilising multiple modifiers, including Geometry Nodes. The edit-mode workflows teach you how to modify your geometry based on  topological adjustments like understanding where it insert loop cuts, splits, connecting vertices, and others.
Throughout the course, most of the emphasis is placed towards procedural workflows. Yet, it is equally as important to have prime knowledge of modifying topology of any given massing that is sometimes essential for further development.  
Part 2 - Architectural concepts
After you learn the techniques for creating quick architectural massings, we will investigate turning some of the massings into a more developed architectural concepts,  portraying a sense of scale and proportion. Will still part in early ideation phase, these architectural concepts will  provide snapshots to understand and communicate whether the project is evolving in the desired direction, without needing to resolving all the project parameters. 

In this phase, we first will look at modifying a massing to create topological continuity. This is both easier in some respects and more difficult. It is easier because sometimes to process of modifying geometry directly is more straightforward. Yet, in the initial highly iterative design process, where numerous massings need to be generated quickly, manually adjusting the topology for multiple options becomes a time consuming and repetitive process.
Thus, second, we will investigate procedural techniques of generating architectural concepts from the earlier sets of massings. The intent is to provide you with highly creative workflows by reducing the manual process of editing the massings to a minimum. In this step-by-step process, the techniques become more advanced where, eventually you will learn how to further streamline the process with Geometry Nodes into an almost completely automated massing and architectural concept generation process.
Throughout the course, we will be utilising the Tissue addon to tessellate panel components onto the massings. This step is a further optimisation process that helps reduce the time you need to spend on creating options so you can get to the right one quickly and efficiently.

Part 3 - Presentation

Presenting work is as important as generating the work. Hence, why we believe it is as essential to provide knowledge for you that teaches you how to present concepts effectively. This includes creating hidden-line type renderings, isometric cameras, and laying your models in a manners that showcases your design process thinking to the stakeholders (clients, managers, professors).

What you get

To help you learn more optimally and progressively, the course includes assignments that allow you to practice with your own ideas beyond the material presented. The best work that is submitted will be showcased throughout this course and on social media with credits.  

Furthermore, you will gain access to an exclusive community of other students like you where you can ask questions and showcase your work. Additionally, you can comment directly on each lesson and you will have access to email support

The course includes automatically generated subtitles which can be searched in the video player. This his highly useful when you like to go back and find a reference for something you remember watching initially.

This course also includes live sessions where you can ask your questions directly to the instructor. The live sessions will be recorded and uploaded to the course curriculum so even if you missed a live session, you would be able to recap and learn from other students' questions.

By the end of this course you will :


  • Reduce the time you spend on creating massings in the earliest ideation phases of design List item two
  • Enable more creative output of your ideas by learning how to work more effectively with Blender's inherent procedural workflows List item four
  •  Produce your designs more efficiently with Geometry Nodes and the Tissue addon. 
  •  Compellingly record and present your design processes. 

Course Curriculum

Meet your Instructor

Dimitar presenting at Blender Conference in Amsterdam.

Mixed use project for which Dimitar was responsible currently under construction.

Dimitar Pouchnikov

Dimitar is an experienced architect, designer, and educator with over 13 years professional experience. He is driven by the desire to create beautiful spaces, buildings, and cities that work excellently for all users. His design philosophy is based on creating beautiful architecture through the intersection of design, creating a sense of place, and technology. This philosophy drives both his professional and academic research.  

With most of his experience gained while working at distinguished architecture offices in London, Dimitar understands the architectural design process wholeheartedly. Having led teams as a project designer, he is aware how to communicate to both professionals and to clients successfully. He has and continues to communicate design visions confidently that manifest into beautiful and functional projects.

Dimitar knows that the proper architectural design process is demanding and rigorous, necessitating many revisions and parallel design explorations. He is grateful to have worked in teams that have taught him and enabled him to execute this proper design process - balancing beauty, function, user requirements, buildability, vision, and giving back.

Over the years, Dimitar has developed a balanced concept-driven design approach with industry-leading parametric design skills. Having the ability to move from a simple sketch to a complex 3d model quickly and effectively is an essential skill to move through design ideas efficiently. In this manner, finding the right mix of design ideas is achieved as quickly as possible, without wasting time redrawing or re-modelling unnecessary and repetitive steps. At the same time, parametric design enables inserting greater design intelligence into projects while reducing the effort required to document project parameters for construction. 

Dimitar aims to work as much as possible with free, open-source, and non-subscription tools like Blender, Rhino, Grasshopper, and Affinity that allow professionals to have access to their drawings and designs without the need to rent their software just to access previous designs. 

Blender is an essential part of Dimitar’s software design toolkit and he is on a mission to show as many architects and designers its key strategic advantages. He shows various use cases on the UH Studio Design Academy youtube channel, teaches numerous courses through UHSDA, and frequently collaborates with the industry’s leading education platforms like PA Academy, Futurly, Dezact and others. Dimitar also speaks at international conferences about the advantages of using Blender as a design tool.

Professionally, Dimitar has worked on many typologies, ranging from Cultural, Commercial, Residential, Urban Design, Sport, Entertainment, Masterplanning, and High-rise/mega-tall buildings. Among others, he has worked at HOK and Adjaye Associates in London. 

Dimitar holds a postgraduate M.Arch degree from the Architectural Association, Design Research Lab Programme and a 5 year professional B.Arch degree from Tyler School of Art, Temple University, in Philadelphia.

Dimitar learned Maya at the DRL programme at the AA and realised that everything that Zaha designers were teaching us with Maya can be done with Blender, and even more! After graduating, he transferred over his newly acquired Maya design skills to Blender and has been further expanding them since.


Course Pricing

Lifetime access

€65

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