Parametric Bricks
In 2016, archi-union architects and fab-union intelligent engineering completed the renovation of the art gallery in Shanghai, China. The distinctive feature of the building was the robotic masonry fabrication of the brick facades. The undulating and waving parametric bricks were increasingly becoming popular after the introduction of parametric design tools such as Grasshopper and the works of Gramazio & Kohler at ETH Zurich since 2008, I guess. I made two Grasshopper experiments in 2012 and 2013 to generate such structures. Today I decided to revisit this fun exercise by trying to mimic one of the facades of Shanghai which utilizes special bricks with holes in them. The Grasshopper definition utilizes a vector field to generate the necessary wavy number sets. I think it could be much more advanced and made much more flexible later on.
This Grasshopper definition generates the Parametric Brick Walls based on several input parameters. You can control the charge points of the vector field if you bake and re-reference them. Also, you can control the number of bricks on the wall. It is possible to generate my inspiration, or explore different designs if you bake the brick model, revise, and re-reference it. The output of the definition is a set of closed polysurfaces. So it is ready for 3D printing or manufacturing with a robotic arm. The code is using native Grasshopper components. So, you don’t need extra add-ons. This simple tool is useful if you are planning to build a parametric brick wall.
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