Assignment: Give Me Shelter
For this assignment, I attempted to emulate the form of existing shelters and explore possible applications for using parametric design to implement dynamic structural elements. The base design for my model follows a basic curved bus shelter design as seen below.
The eventual shape and form of my shelter is as follows:
Modelling Approach:
To create this structure, I first developed a base list of inputs and parameters to define the controlling geometry which are a series of lines to define the length and width of the structure. Even though I am taking this class for 2 units, I included a dynamic geometry component to have the shelter surface follow a sine wave with input parameters to control the wave amplitude and number of waves.
Next, I created charts for users to define the number of rib structures and number of panel points so that adaptive components and panels could be modelled.
Finally, with the points, I created a series of family charts so that users can define the type of structure and surface panels modelled on the proposed shelter.
To have some freedom of expression in how the shelter could be designed, I elected to mirror the structure by repeating the steps above but amending the geometry lines to be translated on the negative axes. Combining these two series of charts allowed for a bi-directional shelter that could be applied on road centre medians for instance and serve as a shelter for buses traversing bi-directionally.
Users can change the length, width and waviness of the shelter. Parameters are also available for users to change the number of rib structures and define the type of component/panel to be adopted in the shelter design.