Introduction:

The RE:Ukraine Villages project by balbek bureau, an award-winning interior design and architecture practice from Kyiv, is more than just an architecture tool—it’s a bridge to Ukraine’s cultural identity, built for a country in recovery. Using Grasshopper and leveraging ShapeDiver’s platform for interactive online experiences, this initiative lets users recreate traditional Ukrainian homes while preserving their architectural roots.

The balbek team developed the project after witnessing the devastation in villages across Ukraine, driven by a desire to honor regional heritage in the rebuilding process. The platform combines field research with modern parametric tools, providing detailed digital models of Ukrainian homes that reflect each region’s unique design traditions. From intricate decorative elements to structural variations, users can explore countless configurations designed to keep cultural history at the forefront.

The collaboration between balbek bureau, Entire Framework, and ShapeDiver has turned RE:Ukraine Villages into a one-of-a-kind configurator that is as accessible as it is impactful. This interview dives into how each partner contributed to the project, the challenges they overcame, and the strategies they used to create an intuitive, meaningful, and uniquely Ukrainian digital tool. We hope you enjoy it!

1. Can you tell us a bit about your team and your company's overall vision?

RE:Ukraine Villages project is initiated and powered by balbek bureau, an award-winning interior design and architecture practice from Kyiv, Ukraine. Our bureau designs commercial, residential and cultural spaces in Europe, America and Asia.

Our team is known for thinking outside the box: we turned a church in San Francisco into an event venue, created a movable art space, and transformed a former military arsenal into a teeming food hall. Our CEO, Slava Balbek, has even traveled to Antarctica to create an art installation.

Before Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the bureau mostly focused on hospitality and corporate projects; now, we juggle our work and volunteering. Since March 2022, we have been developing a series of social initiatives titled RE:Ukraine System, and we are proud to have ShapeDiver as our partner.

2. How did the RE:Ukraine Villages project originate, and what was its inspiration?

Our CEO came up with this idea after seeing the aftermath of the Russian occupation in the liberated part of the Kyiv region. The Russian forces damaged thousands of private residential buildings, and witnessing this damage made us think about the future of Ukrainian villages. Our team gathered that the rebuilding would happen promptly and with no regard for local design traditions, and this is something we, as architects, wanted to prevent.

RE:Ukraine Villages tool is based on thorough research of each region's design code. Our team examines structural and decorative patterns and presents them in an accessible digital format for people to discover and consider when (re)building their homes.

3. Could you explain Grasshopper's role in the RE:Ukraine Villages project and its importance to its success?

RE:Ukraine Villages wouldn’t be possible without Grasshopper. The number of unique house configurations available just for the Kyiv region reached over 200 million. Producing this number of models and drawings manually would be simply not feasible. Even the slightest change in the design would mean we’d have to start from scratch and do so for every new region.

Parametric modeling lets us construct the house using algorithms, patterns, dependencies, functions, and formulas. This makes all the elements of the model interdependent and interchangeable, producing a vast field for variation with just a few clicks.

Grasshopper allows us to be extremely flexible and fast. This tool is not only useful for our users but also aids our design process and helps us test and refine the dimensions of the elements and their combinations, as we frequently notice conflicts between different geometries in the early stages.

4. Were any specific Grasshopper plugins or tools particularly useful during the project?

One of the biggest bottlenecks in our development process was importing all the necessary geometry from Rhino into Grasshopper, meshing, and internalizing it. For every new region, that is hundreds of breps, their respective 2D projections, and anchor points. For the first region, we manually set all these geometries to separate nodes (ouch), but this method quickly became very painful and tiring.

The greatest optimization happened when we discovered the ”Dynamic Geometry Pipeline” from the plugin “Human,” which imported all our volumes, curves, and points into Grasshopper in one click and let us store them in just one node, which in turn, significantly simplified the task of internalization. Now, any slightest change in the Rhino geometry could be instantaneously updated in Grasshopper. That feels really good! What doesn’t feel good is not being able to find a specific element in an enormous list of flattened data.

For this reason, we started augmenting all the geometry in Rhino with Key/Value attributes describing its category (porch, window, etc), material (timber, brick), size, variation, etc. Then, having imported the geometry into Grasshopper and reading its attributes using Human’s “Object Attributes,” we constructed a data tree where every data tree path to some particular geometry was composed of its enumerated attribute values. Read: hash table in Grasshopper.

Finding the right element became as easy as listing the desired values of the geometry attributes, turning them into a path, and extracting the right branch from the data tree. We constantly have to keep in mind that our application has to run on the web and it has to run fast. Being able to efficiently import, store, retrieve the selected elements, and quickly combine them into a house drastically improved the user experience.

5. Can you describe the workflow, starting from the initial field research to the digital modeling phase?

First, our researchers would go on field trips to take photos and measurements and talk to locals. At the same time, another group of researchers would make the most out of online resources, such as marketplaces, where they might come across house-for-sale ads containing photos and floor plans. We’re also glad when local experts and academics take the initiative to guide us through the region's historical background. Once all the materials find their way to Google Drive, our architects switch to the Miro board and start the analysis and pattern identification.

The final selection of decorative elements for every region is usually composed not of the most vibrant or sophisticated but of the most prevalent and characteristic elements in the respective area. 5 is usually the limit on the number of element variations we include in each step to make the configurator as millennial-friendly as possible. Gradually, the final elements materialize from photos to 2D drawings and then 3D models, which are later imported into Grasshopper and combined by pure computational magic into a traditional Ukrainian village house.

The last move before taking it online is to describe the available steps in the configurator and the restrictions on possible element combinations to our team of web developers, Entire Framework, to ensure the right structure of steps and available buttons.

6. What role does ShapeDiver play in the RE:Ukraine Villages project, and how does it enhance the user experience?

In all fairness, we haven’t ever encountered any alternative to ShapeDiver. It’s an absolutely unique and incredible tool. We wouldn’t know how to bring our project to life without it. 

When we talk about culture, it’s all about the story and the feelings, especially during the war when Russia is actively trying to annihilate our identity. By building this online configurator, we wanted to give people an opportunity to rediscover a part of their lives that may have been forgotten, unnoticed, or never closely analyzed because of how habitual and mundane it has become. The objects around us have so much beauty and history behind them only if we stop and pay attention.

The magic lies in the very interactive experience that ShapeDiver provides. You feel like you’re not only observing a static image or drawing as if you were in a museum but actively participating, almost joining a game. By making a conscious choice on every step, experimenting, looking at the building from different angles, you’re paying way more attention to the details than you would if you were merely passing by another stand or turning another page of a book. You’re in a discover mode.

Apart from fun, ShapeDiver also enables us to provide a tangible result – a PDF with custom drawings for your specific house and complete documentation on every element in the region's selection for further examination (and even some easter eggs in the end). The newly customized house now feels closer to reality than ever. You designed it! Now, it’s part of you!

We’ve received multiple messages on our Instagram profile from people sharing their emotions after assembling a house reminiscent of their grandmother's dwelling from childhood. Some of them even went on to repaint their houses inspired by our selections of color palettes.

7. How does ShapeDiver contribute to making parametric design accessible to a broader audience beyond just architects and designers? What strategies ensured non-experts can easily use the RE:Ukraine Villages tool?

Our mission was to create a tool accessible to users from various backgrounds regardless of their technical proficiency, familiarity with architectural terminology, or artistic skills. Needless to say, we expected our interest group to largely consist of elderly people living in villages.

Architects should make all the tough decisions and then present the solutions in the simplest way possible. First, we ensured that the selection of elements was large enough to satisfy the need for variety but not too broad to overwhelm and demotivate. Clearly defined intuitive steps, big buttons with easily distinguishable visuals, color accents, and clarifying notes where necessary are designed to make the process as smooth and natural as possible.

On every step, the geometry that’s being selected is accentuated in dark grey to avoid any ambiguity in naming for people who haven’t casually taken a class on building components in ancient Greek architecture. The camera zooms in and out as well. The flexibility of Grasshopper and the broad capabilities of ShapeDiver made realizing these ideas not just easy but also enjoyable.

8. Did you face any particular challenges during the development phase? If so, how did you overcome them?

We started with little to no knowledge or skills in coding and made way more unintelligent mistakes than we’d like to admit. Apart from figuring out how to code the entire application in Grasshopper, we also had to find the most optimized method to do so while taking into the account the ShapeDiver rules and capabilities.

It wouldn’t be an overstatement to say we owe our success to ShapeDiver’s YouTube channel. There, we learned pretty much everything we needed to know about modeling, optimization, meshing, PDF generation, and much more. These materials provided solutions to some of our most pressing issues, especially regarding PDF formation.

Initially, we used to send dozens of fairly complex elements through the Make2D function to create our facade drawings, which sent our computing times into the stratosphere for what usually ended up not being the highest quality result. The suffering was eased when we found the ShapeDiver tutorial on keeping the respective 2D projections in a separate list and retrieving the ones to be seen in the selected configuration. This way, we increased our control over the resulting drawings and drastically cut the computing times.

9. How did Balbek Bureau, ShapeDiver, and Entire Framework collaborate? What strategies were used to manage communication and ensure seamless design and technology integration? 

It’s safe to say we were on the same page regarding the design concept from the start, so all communication leading to design decisions involved just a couple of Figma iterations. We knew we wanted a simple yet catchy interface that different age groups could use.

Internally, we used messengers for instant communication, held weekly meetings to sync on the timeline and discuss blockers, and relied on simple management software to align teams. Specs-wise, our configurators have a lot of related logic, such as 'don't display parameter Y if parameter X was selected in the previous step', so for each region, we compose a specification document to describe these limitations for the frontend team.

Because our configurators are quite complex in terms of logic and contain different parameter types, the main strategy for integrating the configurator was to get it in front of humans for testing as fast as possible, allowing us to iterate quickly. We gathered groups of testers through messengers, both from the professional field and outside of it, which allowed us to gather feedback based on real use cases and predict almost any potential future bug.

We also added a bug report contact and a feedback form on the site to collect any additional input.

The ShapeDiver team helped us significantly during the model optimization stage, resulting in a drastic reduction in computational time. We primarily communicated via email and held several dedicated calls to share ideas for making the configurator as smooth as possible. We also used the ShapeDiver forum to pass knowledge to future builders.

10. How scalable is the RE:Ukraine Villages project, and do you have plans to expand it to other regions or architectural styles?

We made a great effort to automate and optimize all the possible steps in the region's development to process and release them faster without losing quality or depth. The plan is of course to cover the entire territory of Ukraine and to make it fast. While we’re looking for funding and new partnerships for the RE:Ukraine Villages project, we’re simultaneously employing our newly gained skills and expertise to build a different configurator, this time for prefabricated modular buildings inspired by our RE:Ukraine Housing project.

11. What do you see as the future of computational design in architecture, especially in projects focused on cultural heritage and preservation?

Everything that concerns cultural heritage and preservation should be very personal and addressed in a case-to-case manner. Computational design is something we came to naturally from how our goal was formulated, but it might not be the best solution for a different problem.

Yet, there are many technological developments that look promising but need a fair amount of testing. Currently, we’re collaborating with some technical universities in Ukraine that develop custom LoRA models for Stable Diffusion so that we can generate images in the style of our studio. At the same time, we’ve been working on an R&D project called RE:Ukraine Vision, which would allow a user to take a photo of a destroyed building and generate a vision of its reconstruction. Such tools could potentially be used in the early stages of communicating with the customer or the stakeholders to rapidly and effortlessly test a batch of ideas.

A bit further away from culture, equally exciting innovations are happening in the development realm with projects like Finch, Delve from Google’s Sidewalk Lab, Space Syntax, Bonava, and many others. They all are developing generative design tools that allow architects to focus less on designing to comply with building regulations and more on planning to achieve the necessary metrics that actually improve and simplify our lives.

- This truly an amazing project. Thank you very much for your time!

Thank you very much to the ShapeDiver team for helping us throughout this process.

That's it for this new edition of Getting to know... Don't forget to visit RE:Ukraine Villages and follow balbek bureau on their social media channels!

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