#paneling

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…

This is the continuation of my previous study on the Fibonacci lattice on a spherical surface, creating a Fibonacci Dome structure. The panelization of curved forms with flat surfaces has been a favorite topic in architectural geometry. The trigonometric layout of the Fibonacci sequence generates a spherical formation, while the Faceted Dome component handles planarity. Here, I further enhanced the previous code into a pavilion design. The essential part of the code is about the placement of points on the half…

Here is a simple pavilion design I call the Turtle Pavilion. It was exceptionally easy. The planar shapes placed on the sphere continue to be planar after the ellipsoidal deformations. I was amazed when I first noticed this, for some reason. With Grasshopper’s Facet Dome component, we can panel spheres as we desire. When we deform these panels in the X, Y, and Z directions, they continue to remain planar. After deformation, we can create the desired macro forms by…

This is an update on my 2012 exercise on rhombille tiling. This reminded me of the old-school subdivisions of surfaces again after 11 years. It was while reading about rhombic dodecahedron (the stackable solid), that I came across this cute tiling. It’s quite simple, just a hexagonal grid with a special reconstruction. I decided to recreate it by using well-known native Grasshopper components. I animated the result with a variation of the Breaststroke surface function (described here). Then I reconstructed…

As the design of free-form architectural surfaces becomes easier, questioning and foreseeing the feasibility of the construction of these surfaces becomes important. Such an inquiry requires sufficient knowledge of architectural geometry besides the knowledge of materials and structural systems. In this article, we present a preliminary example of a guide. It supports the design and production process of building surfaces with different geometric properties is presented. This guide aims to reveal the relationship between Gaussian curvature and surface paneling. It…

This is based on my failure of creating an optimum solution for planar polygonal subdivisions. There is a method called Tangent Plane Intersection (TPI), explained briefly here (sometimes similar algorithms are called “planar remeshing” and  “variational shape approximation”) which is effectively used in the Trada pavilion (here). I tried to implement a similar method using only native Grasshopper components and no recursion, but it quickly became much more complicated than I thought. It was based on the simple idea that…

For the last 10 days, I’ve been searching for a proper algorithm for representing surfaces using planar shapes. It is obvious that triangulation is an answer but there is an interesting research topic of planar remeshing using shapes other than quads, hexagons, or any other regular polygons. Especially in computer graphics, such things refer to the optimization of models to decrease the load of GPUs. In the Grasshopper community, this has also been discussed and there is a great implementation…

Digging out with Grasshopper, Rhinoscript, and Paneling Tools, everything seems to be more and more automated and fast. However my colleagues Mete, Benay and Elif reminded me that, we can always do much with those high-end architectural geometry tools, but we still have to understand and follow the roots, probably best described by the “manual ways”. Sometimes using these methods would be much more intuitive as they are SLOW enough for designers to think about what is going on there……

As far as I understood, it is impossible to physically construct double-curved surfaces from quadrilateral and planar faces. This definition tries to find an optimized alternative to this problem. Any surface, single or double curved, is divided into standard sub surfaces. But this time, those surfaces are treated as planar surfaces, therefore one corner is moved to meet this requirement. The output consists of only planar surfaces ready for fabrication. There are potential improvements to this definition such as finding…

This is a basic formation of component-based design in a dataflow environment. A double-curved surface is subdivided and re-constructed using straight sections. Parametric model of a surface construction by variable components. The main data list of subsurfaces are distributed into four distinct lists, that will be used to construct lines out of double-curved quadrilateral faces. Such definitions could be further advanced by adding a precise fabrication detail.