Grasshopping
In studio, Neil has asked us to evaluate more parameters, but also to design at a human scale, which is one thing most parametric urbanist projects aren’t talking about. Parameters, you say? As it turns out, I have several of my own up my sleeve, having been dabbling in the realm of Grasshopper to form base units for our towers. It’s crazy because there’s an architecture and a beauty to the equations required to make a digital form, but so far the forms themselves are pretty bland. It would seem like an easy task to do something like tilt the axis of a building – and, in practice, it is. The problem is making the tilt less arbitrary. In Rhino, I can model something, then align the things I’ve modeled along a curve that’s tilted to whatever angle I choose. That’s all fine, but I really don’t want to go through the operations of tilting each tower when I have, say, 37 of them. That’s thirty-six repetitions of a task – which is where Grasshopper comes in. But it actually takes a few additional steps in GH to make it happen – it’s not just drawing a line – it’s drawing a line, defining its endpoints, and moving the endpoints, then redrawing the line to the new endpoints. Craziness. Now, at least, it’s up and running, but it took a lot of thinking on paper, like this:
