Ultan Byrne's project drawing

07.01.18 - Ultan Byrne presents a paper on a new methodology of digital collage for urban design

Daniels Facutly Lecturer Ultan Byrne (MArch 2013) presented the paper "Point Cloud Paint: A Software Tool for Speculative Urban Design Using Three-Dimensional Digital Collage" at the 2017 Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture (ACADIA) Conferencein November.

From the abstract:

Beginning from a provocation in Auguste Blanqui’s "Eternity by the Stars", this paper reports on a new methodology of digital collage for urban design. The research is situated relative to the current discourses surrounding both voxelization and point-cloud data structures in order to motivate the concept of a recombinant approach to design in existing cities. Building on these sources, and with reference to recent developments in mesh shape composition techniques, the paper presents the resulting software implementation “Point-Cloud-Paint”: a tool that enables collage-based combinatorial experimentation with urban point-cloud data.


The conference was hosted by the M.I.T. School of Architecture + Planning at the Media Lab.

A graduate of the University of Toronto's Master of Architecture program, Byrne also holds degrees in philosophy and architectural design, and is a computer programmer.

He recently published a review of The Internet Archive in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (JSAH).