Max Harris

After getting my first sunburn of the spring a few days ago, I was inspired to create a shade structure. When brainstorming different forms, I thought about my visit last weekend to Tulane. They used to have a tree where students would throw their Mardi Gras beads, but unfortunately it fell down. So, the university replaced it with a metal tree that is so incredibly ugly. It’s depressingly simplistic and, in my opinion, removes all of the whimsy that trees provide.

I thought: if I were to make a tree shade structure at Stanford, what would it look like? I’m from Boston and I will never forget the awe I felt when I saw the Stanford palm trees for the first time, so I decided to make a palm tree like form.

I started by making 3 concentric circles: a base, the top of the curve, and the rim. I connected the curves with vertical ribs and made an irregular shape to sweep over them. Then I lofted the surfaces together and created a grid of panels.

In order to get a whimsical wavy movement in the tree, I decided to make the rim a sin curve. This proved to be way more challenging than I thought and took me over 4 hours to get right. The hardest part was subdividing the circle and figuring out how to make a continuous sin wave. I ended up using vectors to calculate arc lengths and then did a bunch of math formulas to get the sin wave of points. Later, when looking on canvas to solve a different problem, I found a powerpoint with an example that did the same thing in way fewer blocks using circular coordinates. While I will definitely use that next time, I’m still happy that I tried it my way because it was a really fun challenge and exercised my problem solving, math, and Grasshopper skills pretty thoroughly :)

First, I applied panel frames to all the panels. Then, I split the panels into two groups, based on a series. I essentially wanted to isolate a spiral of panels I could make into different colors to make the tree more natural feeling. I colored the larger group of panels two shades of green (one for the frame and one for the inner panel), then I colored the frame of the spirals another shade of green. Finally, I colored the inside panels of the spiral a brown color to represent coconuts!

Here’s another version that would be much larger and flatter!