A design element that I’ve come across in the last few years that’s intrigued me are the railing panels in the Visual Arts Building in Iowa by Steven Holl.
I’m curious if this pattern could be recreated in Grasshopper, and I’m not sure it wasn’t created in Grasshopper to begin with.
It appears that the pattern consists of a set number of shapes that can be rotated in 90-degree increments. But then, it doesn’t appear that there is any actual pattern to their layout. So this makes me think it can be created by performing some sort of packing where a set amount of space is provided b/w each shape as it gets packed together, but the shapes are not allowed to rotate as they get packed.
But perhaps there’s a way to tackle this with native Grasshopper apps as well.
I want to try and create a definition later today, but I thought I’d present the problem to the community here first.
If you wanted a repeating pattern, you could use something like this periodic packing example (and optionally lock the rotations)
(probably overkill for this, as the shapes there don’t need to be densely packed, so probably just packing bounding boxes would be enough and much lighter)
but from that picture I can’t see any obvious periodic pattern at all (or its quite a large repeating unit).
I just hope it wasn’t done by some poor intern placing them all manually!
Hi Cyclist,
I am the project architect of the Visual Arts Building and I laid out this pattern per Steven’s inspiration from the subtractive light courts, and needed to be a certain density for a balance of strength and transparency. While we tried various scripts in grasshopper we could never quite achieve the same density and ‘random’ pattern as we initially drew in the first mockups. Eventually we had a team of 4 people laying these patterns out on templates; it was a very exhaustive process I ended up seeing these patterns in my dreams. Thanks for your interest in the panels!
Thank you for filling me in—The railing panels are a nice element, well done!
Do you know anything about the twisted metal brackets on the railings? I know Steven has used these brackets in a few of his recent projects. Are they custom or do they come as a product?
You’re right, the twisted stanchions are a staple in the office. I like them so much I had some made for the handrail in my own exterior stoop. Any decent iron worker can make them out of solid steel rectangular bar stock. We modeled ours in rhino and showed it to our iron worker who then made a few samples. It took a couple tries to get the twist right so it wasn’t too abrupt but rather smooth.
Got it, that’s what I figured. I found them quite fun to model in Rhino, especially when you have to do a few variations. I may have copied them in a project as well, but it’s just a rendering…
