A Penrose tiling exemplifies a type of tiling known as aperiodic. In this context, tiling involves covering a plane with non-overlapping polygons or shapes. Aperiodic means the tiling lacks arbitrarily large repeating sections. These tilings derive their name from mathematician and physicist Roger Penrose, who extensively studied them during the 1970s. Despite their absence of translational symmetry, Penrose tilings can exhibit both reflection symmetry and fivefold rotational symmetry. I created a simple Penrose Tiling Generator in Grasshopper. I used the…

It is not possible to cover a double curvature surface with planar quads. Here is one method that overcomes quad tiling on double curvature by pulling one vertex of the quads to the plane defined by the other three. This method was used in architecture on several occasions such as the exterior facade of The Yas Hotel, designed by Asymptote Architecture in 2009. The same approach is also evident in the roof design covering the central courtyard of the Smithsonian…

Today’s beautiful curve is the spherical cycloid. It is a cycloid, rolling on a 3d circular path rather than a straight and 2d one. There are algebraic explanations of this curve. Therefore, I find it interesting to experiment with them, since it is more interesting than the regular planar cycloids, epicycloids, and hypocycloids. This curve is believed to have been studied first by Jean Bernoulli in 1732. The interesting and playful part of this is the resulting curve is always…

Gyroid is a popular triply-periodic minimal surface. Although it is a mathematical entity, designers and architects like its approximations very much. We used an interpretation of Gyroid in the rammed-earth structure: “Common-action Wall” in 2017. In that project, we utilized its spatial quality of dividing the space into two intertwining and symmetrical volumes. By making one of these volumes solid, I left the other void. So, in this tutorial, I am going to explain modeling the Gyroid Solid by utilizing…

An Archimedean solid is a convex isogonal (vertex-transitive) and nonprismatic solid that is composed of two or more regular polygonal faces. There are thirteen such solids in geometry. Coding the snub dodecahedron study aims to generate one of these solids, composed of 12 regular pentagons, and 80 regular triangles. You can generate the snub dodecahedron by expanding and twisting the faces of a dodecahedron outward. This also creates rhombicosidodecahedron, which is another Archimedean solid. If you expand and twist the…

In this short tutorial, I am showing the essentials of data domains in Grasshopper. A domain is a data type in Grasshopper that represents a portion of the 1d or 2d number space. This requires a starting and ending point in those spaces. In 1d, these points are two numbers. Then, the domain represents all the numbers between them. In 2d, a data domain is represented by two coordinates (u, v). This presentation illustrates this concept with the area defined…

Curvature can be roughly described as how much a curve is “turning” at point a P. We place two “very” close tangents and measure the difference between them. The closer these tangents are, the more precise our approximation would be. An osculating circle is a tangent circle that has the same curvature as the curve at point P. The larger the circle, the more “flat” the curve is. An infinitely large osculating circle means the curve is linear at point…

Truncation refers to the process of shortening something by removing parts. You can apply truncation to numbers, text, or data in various contexts. A truncated polyhedron is a geometric solid formed by truncating the vertices of a regular polyhedron. Truncation involves cutting off the corners or vertices of the polyhedron in such a way that the original faces become polygons with new edges. This process creates new faces at the truncated vertices. It often results in a shape that is…

In 1986, Craig Reynolds developed an algorithm aiming to model the flocking behavior of birds, which remains a cult method used in flock simulations today. In my initial study, the bird-oids (boids) have no rules or limitations, just chilling randomly on the screen. I call this initial version Wandering Simulator. There are several reasons why this fundamental simulation is difficult in Grasshopper and Python, our parametric design interface. In Grasshopper (data flow modeling), pushing the back doors a bit is…

Here is a method for coding the dodecahedron and all its irregular variants in Grasshopper as quickly as possible. I utilized the golden ratio rectangles, usually used to construct the sister polyhedron, the icosahedron. However, the magic component of the Grasshopper, the Faceted Dome rescued me again to generate the dual of it, the dodecahedron. This is a special platonic solid, which has 12 regular pentagonal faces. There are several techniques that I generally prefer to use in Grasshopper. You…