The cellular canopy is an anonymous tutorial on the history recording capability of Rhino. I’ve been using a “pedagogical” version of this tutorial as an educational tool on the introduction to Grasshopper and Parametric Modeling for architects. The interesting thing with such exercises is they…

There are a couple of experiments in different schools about organizing free-form surfaces (walls here) with a composition of modular elements (bricks). Even though they created robots to make such brick walls, I still couldn’t understand why. Although creating a parametric model that calculates the…

Inspired by Andru Pavlov’s design, I used a curve to accomplish grid tearing. It’s straightforward, and from an educational perspective, this exercise includes several potentials on vector arithmetics and graph manipulation techniques. As a design domain, this definition stresses the use of associative entities in…

This was my first serious Grasshopper study. In 2009, I decided to attend a design contest for a campus entrance. Of course, the jury didn’t know that the design resulted from a parametric model. I have called this Parametric Entrance since then. The starting point…

It has been a tough problem for me, for the last two days. A parametric model of an interlocking structure (sometimes also called egg-crate, waffle, or contouring structure) can be created easily in Grasshopper using a Contour component. In addition, you need a couple of…

In the post of “animated parameters” we created a video file using Grasshopper’s “animate” functionality. A sequence of images are then joined together to form a video file. This time, we’ll create an animated gif image that can be played on web without even using a…

Since the mid-20th century, the hyperbolic paraboloid surface has been one of the most popular mathematical forms for architects. Named Hypar in short, this is the Quadric Surface equation of the Hyperbolic Paraboloid. Erik Demaine summarizes several examples from architecture such as the roof of…

When an educational system does not meet the requirements of a paradigm, new teaching approaches start to emerge. Today, design computing pushes forward a similar transformation on architectural education. Design studio, as the dominant setting for architectural learning, is the center of this transformation. There…

An octahedron is a polyhedron and platonic solid with 8 faces of identical equilateral triangles. In this post, I will try to explain the drawing and unrolling process of the octahedron. It has a close relationship with the cube as it’s dual. In order to…

[2011_12_25_divide] here is the fundamental of surface subdivision in Grasshopper. In order to design a parametric truss exercise, this is the generally accepted starting point. Get a surface from the file, subdivide it into U and V directions to create point lists, and then manipulate…