Organic tree parametric skyscrapper - guidence needed

Grasshopper
#1

Hi everyone,

This is my first post of this website. I will try to go into as much details as possible about the project that I am currently working on and what is expected from me to have as a final outcome by May this year.

So the project is a parametric skyscraper with as much detail as possible. I have attached reference images that I’ve found on this website to help visualise roughly how I want the tower to look like. Unfortunately I have only used grasshopper once in my life and with the amount of detail that is required for my model to be I just don’t have the knowledge and time to learn it. I am asking for guidance on how to progress through this or links to tutorials.

The tower is to reflect the natural curves of a tree and its roots.

So, the model would need to have:

1)parametric shape (picture 1)

  1. floor levels with floor thickness and the structural columns going through the whole tower (picture 2)

3)bottom part of the tower concept is shown in pictures (3 and 3.5) - the bottom part to be like roots of a tree

4)facade of the building (picture 4) - organic shapes, similar to those on the picture or even simpler. The important part would be to show the structure for the facade and structural framing for the windows.

Also this includes 3 different levels, where it is partially glazed, completely open and completely covered by facade panels which in this case are in (picture 5 - these can take any shape or size)

5)Picture 6 shows rough sketches of the potential floor plans

6)Picture 7 shows the rough idea of the detail that I would aim for the model to have, or even more detail. The more detail this model could have the better.

I would much appreciate any help that I could get, how to start and how to progress through this model.

Many Thanks !

Images are included in the link below

#2

You can upload your images and files in your post, see this for further advice on posting:

2 Likes
#3

I’ve been using Grasshopper longer than anyone else (although not more than anyone else) and this sounds pretty difficult to me. Is there really a point in throwing something together that you do not really understand and cannot really control or verify? It might of course not be up to you, this sounds like a school assignment someone else picked for you, in which case bad luck.

Given that you have basically one month to do this, I think you need to pick a goal which is achievable in that time. And that includes you fully understanding both the problem and the solution. Here are some ideas about what I imagine achievable problems might be:

  1. Given a pre-existing shape, assumed to be clad in a reflective material, determine the amount of solar energy focused on the area surrounding that shape. Even something as seemingly trivial as this gets complicated really quickly. You’ll need to figure out the solar paths throughout the year for your location, combine those with the solar radiance (either average or worst case) for each moment in time which probably involves some atmospheric equations or even climate data. You then need to figure out how your reflective material behaves. Which wavelengths get reflected how strongly based on a given angle, and so forth. Then you need to generate a lot of data throughout one year and collate it into some sort of table or graph or map.
  2. Given a set of soft or hard constraints, figure out the maximum envelope within which a building must remain. You could take a particle or voxel approach, or maybe a surfacing one. Once you have your maximum boundary, you can then try and do some statistics on that shape to see how much floor space you could maximally generate, or a thousand other metrics.
1 Like
#4

Ach ci studenci… :slight_smile: