Part 1:
I used Dynamo for part 1, and chose the parametric flying chevron as my tower of choice because I think it looks pretty cool with the twisting effect. (Although I should add that I don’t think it’s a very constructable or practical tower in reality).
(Mine on the left, and the imported default on the right)
Since the assignment requested only that we flex one of the building’s many parameters, I chose to flex the mid rotation from 0 to 90 degrees. The remaining parameters were defined as shown below:
With a top height of 510’ and a floor to floor height of 15’, I had 34 mass floors in the structure. The base and top rotation were both set to 0 in order to isolate the effect of the mid rotation parameter changing.
My Dynamo script looks like the following:
I pretty much followed the workflow as presented in the modules, with the only major change being that I decided to edit the evaluate single input node to report all three building stats: gross floor area, gross surface area, and gross volume.
As always, I like to have a control panel, and as always I like to use integer sliders to generate ranges instead of using code blocks. I varied the mid rotation from 0 to 90 degrees in increments of 5, creating 19 test cases.
Then I evaluated the single parameter (mid rotation) using list mapping:
Then I reported all the results to Excel in separate tabs for each parameter:
The results frankly aren’t the most interesting — as the middle rotation increases with respect to the top and bottom rotation, all three building stats (GFA, GSA and GV) all significantly decrease. I imagine in the real world the cost of constructing this building would also significantly increase as the rotation increases (beyond some wind shedding benefit that a slight rotation would bring), so it seems keeping the rotation of the middle section small is more beneficial to the ultimate design of the building.
Part 2:
In keeping with my tradition of flip flopping between programs to give myself whiplash, I used Grasshopper for part 2.
A completely useless overview of my script to show the general structure:
An image of one of the iterations that was produced of the tower:
I’ll give a deeper look at the script now…. As always I like to have a control panel with the variables that are parametrically alterable. My control panel has a linked section — I based the tower one a random curve that I drew in Rhino because I wanted the look to be a bit more organic. As the assignment suggested, I chose two parameters to flex — these were the tower angle of twist and the top section scale factor. I moved these into a separate control panel because they were needed as inputs in the Anemone loop.
First, I generated the base section of the tower. I did a typical lofted tower from three sections, so this is the bottom section. I made it by moving the curve I drew to the origin and scaling the curve based on the desired ground floor area.
Next, I created the middle and top sections based on scale factors for each (located in the control panel). I based both the twist and the height of the middle section on the twist and height of the top section, so that the middle section would always be in the exact middle of the tower height, and that the twist of the tower overall would be constant throughout. I didn’t need to do this, but I like the appearance more this way.
Then I just lofted everything and filled in the end curves so the whole volume would be enclosed.
I also generated Grasshopper’s analogous ‘mass floors’ using the methodology taught in the module videos.
Then, I created simple evaluator functions for gross floor area, gross surface area, and gross volume.
Finally, I set up the Anemone loop to iterate through my chosen parameters. I won’t go into the code too much since I pretty much just followed the module instructions. For the two parameters I varied, I used twist angles of 20, 40, 60, and 80 and section scale factors ranging from 0.2 to 1.4 in 0.2 increments, creating 28 test cases. Frankly, I wish there was a better way of being able to change the iteration inputs without having to manually do it in Excel… but I just followed the module methodology. I’ll give it some more thought in future assignments.
Loop start:
Loop end:
I had a lot of difficulty with the write to Excel node — I even downloaded several other Food4Rhino packages to try their write to Excel nodes, but they all seemed to only partially write my data, and never in the way I wanted. The module videos didn’t really provide any instructions on how to use the Excel Write node, so for part 2, I just manually copied over the output data from the panels and sorted it myself.
As of right now, the iteration I ran above doesn’t quite fit the project brief, since the overall square footage of the building is too small — this is because I scaled the ground floor area to be way too small. For a more realistic run of this code, I’d probably scale the ground floor area to be around 50,000 sqft instead of the 6,000 I put in just to test the code out. This is a super simple change.
To speak to the trends shown above: it’s obvious that as the top scale factor increases, all three of the reported output statistics would increase, but it looks like as the twist increases, floor area, surface area, and volume all increase as well! This is kind of the opposite behavior of the tower I had in part 1, which is pretty interesting. I wonder if it has something to do with the shape of the blob I drew in this one.