Osseous Truss Pavilion

In some of the courses I’ve taught, people asked me how to make the structures of these workshop poster images. In this post I show the osseous truss pavilion that I generated to be the image of the workshop at SIGraDi 2009 that I taught along with Gonçalo Castro Henriques.

It is a system originally developed in Grasshopper 0.60019, based on the Surface Box-Box Morph combination explained in section "11.2 Paneling Tools" of the Grasshopper Primer, by Andrew Payne and Rajaa Issa (p.79-83). The first difference is in the prototype that makes the unit of the truss (or geometric pattern, as is referred in the tutorial). In the beginning it was made directly on Rhino, from NURBS curves of degree 2, closing the three points of the triangle of the diagonal division of a square. For this update, the prototype is generated entirely in Grasshopper, using only the grids of control points.

But the key for this to work as the structure from the image is on the topology of the base surface. The base surface of this pavilion is designed in Rhino, lofting between curves that were previously oriented, point by point, to begin longitudinal, grow to become transversal and end longitudinal again, bending over to make a sort of bridge with two supports. The deformation of these surface isocurves was inspired by the stereographic projections of Cartesian grids.

Posted in Parametricismo.

Download here the updated definition for Grasshopper 0.60059.

'Ocurt' assignments: undergraduate advice at ESARQ

During academic year 2008-2009, Professor Antonio Sanmartín and T.A. Marc Camallonga invited me to do an advice in their last year Architectural Projects class, in the undergraduate program at ESARQ – UIC.

Although they don’t consider themselves up to date in matters of digital technologies in architecture, they have a very interesting approach to encourage students to design algorithmically and, by doing so, evolving beyond XX^th century. They begin by studying parameters to create variables from site and context, and also from a very different income: literature. They chose a novel and distributed it, one chapter per student, to generate a diagram from it (in the very Eisenman style!).

My contribution began doing a short lecture on algorithmic design and giving what they called the ‘Ocurt’ assignment: to take the diagram and site variables and develop a complex surface out of them by an algorithmic strategy. Remembering Karl Chu’s reconsideration of Eisenman, I taught them a strategy of synthesizing data and mapping it on a base shape, based on Chu’s morphogenetic approach that he teaches in the Master by an analogic algorithmic strategy (without programming).

In a more advanced stage, I was called for a second 'Ocurt' assignment: a digital fabrication plan. After suggesting some reference reading on the subject, a CAD/CAM strategy was applied to the developed architectural element, so that it could be fabricated in the CNC machine of the school. Some cases required basic training in rationalization of complex surfaces with PanelingTools.

The image shows some student projects at different stages. Photos by Marc Camallonga.

Thanks to Alberto T. Estévez for recommending me to Antonio Sanmartín for this class.