#grasshopper

You might recall this type of parametric brickwork from architectural classics, such as the Programmed Wall by ETH Zurich and Gramazio Kohler Research, or the facade of the Mulberry House by SHoP Architects. Initially, I explored the simplest method for placing boxes on a surface, but this approach didn’t yield the correct layout. To improve it, I introduced gaps, which not only liberated the wall’s design but also opened up exciting possibilities for manipulating the “gap” parameter and brick sizes….

Here are funny icons from Martin Berube (other icon sets of him here) if you plan to build your components or clusters in Grasshopper. It somehow became a fashion of Rhinoceros, to give names of animals to products, that at first seemed to be only the species in danger of extinction. (maybe I am wrong but it is a fact that %85 of Black Rhinos were killed in the past 25 years) However, this tradition seems to be changed eventually…

The famous “Deutsch limit” says, “you cannot have more than -say a hundred- components in a visual programming environment, that is why you cannot write an operating system with it.”; so it says, the perceptual and pedagogical advantages of visual programming are limited according to the size of your screen. However, there are two main oppositions to this argument. One of them says “textual programming environments have the same limitation, as you cannot have more than x lines of code…

Just a quick tip as I thought might be useful in some cases. Generating random numbers in architectural scripting is not a too catchy thing for designers. It is for sure, we want every parameter to be under our control (as if it were possible!). I was thinking about that in Grasshopper. A dataflow graph such as in Grasshopper regenerates whenever necessary (a change on an input value “fires” every connected component), therefore random number component requires your action (for…

After playing with vector fields in 2d (here) it was quite easy to create a 3d surface deformation. Here is my first experiment on a regular triangular grid’s three-dimensional behavior within a vector space, that includes a point charge of varying z coordinates. That makes field lines escape to a bounding box, instead of a bounding rectangle. Again, you may play with force decay, the number of samples, and the “grid blast” parameter, which is just a t-value evaluation of…

Back to the basics. I finally had time to test the vector fields components in Grasshopper. It was a couple of updates ago, a new tool group emerged in the vector tab, introducing different types of vector fields to users. Then, these fields could be merged to form more complex effects. However, I created a very simple example of how we can use those components to distort a system (such as a regular tessellation).  Using attractor forces (usually in geometric…

In this exercise, Grasshopper draws various Archimedean spirals. It constructs polar points and maps them onto a range of angles and a number of points. The spiral’s turning speed is determined by the constant “a,” while the constant “n” gives unique names to the spirals by raising the angle variable to the power of 1/n. Wolfram Mathworld names the spiral with n = -2 as lituus, n = -1 as a hyperbolic spiral, n = 1 as a regular Archimedes…

I’ve been searching for a method to study the Voronoi subdivision in order to manipulate it. There are well-known algorithms for that. But I thought it would be better if I use a projective approach just as I did in studying hyperbolic space (here). This is the metaphor of inflating balloons. However, I inflated cones instead of spheres. This way, it became possible to modify the algorithm. So I was able to develop a kind of variable Voronoi study here….

Today’s Architectural Geometry course was about platonic solids and different attractor objects in introducing component-based design systems. Benay’s idea was both pedagogical and interesting to test in Grasshopper. I searched for the most fundamental type of attractor solid in creating a composition such as this; There is a subdivided sphere and an attractor sphere. The pull component works great here. You may use multiple attractor solids or different shapes such as platonic solids as attractors. It is quite an easy…

The Möbius strip is a famous mathematical object. Although being in three-dimensional space, it is a closed-loop of only one surface and only one edge. This quality alone makes the object an interesting study for computational design. I aimed to create an object to test our new CNC machine. I wanted to test the egg-crate interlocking fabrication method. This is why the study became a Möbius strip fabrication. Apart from its uses in science and technology, here is an interesting…