Sheltered Walkway Design

Design Inspiration and Approach

I was inspired by the Flower Dome in Gardens by the Bay Singapore. The structure is known for being a cavernous cooled conservatory holds the Guinness World Record for being the largest glass greenhouse. As I liked how simple yet elegant the dome was, and I reflected some of its features into my design for a sheltered walkway.

My design approach was to identify the backbone lines that would be the basis of the model, as shown in red below. I decided to model line 1 as a parabolic curve, line 2 as a sine wave and line 3 as a straight line that ties in both lines 1 and 2. Even though I am taking the class for 2 units, I thought it would be interesting to see how the parametric design of my shelter would look with a sine wave instead of another parabolic curve. Overall, this would be slightly different from the original flower dome but would be interesting to see how the design came together with 3 different curves.

Parametric Variables for model

Overall, the sheltered walkway model can be parametrically resized in terms of its length, height, top extension (in the positive or negative y direction), and width.

Specifically, the parabolic curve can be parametrically adjusted via its curvature, and the specific sine wave (line 2) can be parametrically adjusted in terms of the wave amplitude and number of waves. Flexing these variables would result in changes to the final shape of the model since the sine wave is one of the baselines of the structure.

Another aspect of parametric flexibility was given as well, in terms of the number of ribs and number of panels at those ribs.

Model Approach

Starting Points and Lines

First, I created the starting points and lines in Dynamo: the starting line would be the reference line for the parabolic curve (line 1), the top line would remain as it is (line 3) and the last line would be the reference line for the sine wave (line 3).

Parabolic Curve and Sine Waves

The next step was to transform the starting line into a parabolic curve and the reference line into a sine wave. The equations take in some of the parametric variables as inputs that allow the parametric flexibility mentioned above.

Ribs and Panels

After which, these curves and lines were fed into a list and transposed. These points were used as reference points to draw the ribs that cut through and joined all 3 curves.

The same points were put through nurbscurve, for formation of points that determined the quad points for the panels. This also provided the opportunity for the parametric ability to flex the number of panels in the model. Finally, the geometry was loaded into Revit with a uniform 3 pt tube ribs and rectangular 4pt seamless panels.

The final Dynamo model:

The final Revit Model:

Alternative Views: