shelidonFebruary 2, 2018Leave a Comment

Post originally authored for the blog of Strategie Digitali, on February 2nd 2018.

Are you familiar with Vignesh Kaushik‘s blog about Computational Design? I’m sure you are, and shame on you if you’re not. On top of sending you an amazing newsletter every Friday, he’s hosting a great series of webinars. More than a blog, it’s growing into a platform for computational designers and digital designers to connect, mingle, take inspiration from each other, exchange knowledge and scripts.

Me and Claudio are really proud to announce that next Tuesday, February 6th, we’ll be hosted on his platform with a webinar about interoperability between Rhino and Revit, using a mix of Grasshopper and Dynamo but having Flux as the cornerstone. You can find more information about it here, and of course that’s the page you can use to subscribe.

Integrating Building Envelope Design between Revit & Rhino Using Flux

Now, let me be very clear about it: it comes at a price. Hosting the platform is not effortless and Vignesh is charging $ 19.00 to attend. Sorry guys.

Of course with that amount of money you could go out and buy lots of marvelous things. a Dash Rapid Egg Cooker for your office, for instance, or a UBS miniature desk humidifier, in case you find like you need more moisture in your working life.

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If you need assistance, you can check out this article: 26 things under 20$ we use every day.
However, if you scroll down until the end and find out that you can live without a cherry pitter and an iPhone fan, I’ll tell you what you will get from us for your $ 19,00 and we’ll see if we’ve got ourselves a deal.

1. Just another day in the office

Not all offices are, should or want to be full Revit, right? And if yours is, you always have that one consultant, the one working with heavy, touchy animals from central Africa.

We must acknowledge that no software can do everything and that each has their limitations. Practices such as FRONT Inc, DesignToProduction, Proving Ground and AR-MA, have produce fabrication level models of incredibly complex designs using ‘non-BIM’ software. Does this undermine the outcome? Absolutely not, and in fact, such an outcome probably wasn’t even possible with conventional BIM authoring software.
(Paul Wintour, “Putting BIM in Perspective” on Parametric Monkey. September 26th, 2017)

So there you are, minding your own business, when the concept guy comes in with a Rhino model and you have to check for floor efficiency, level coordination, quantities and feasibility. You’ve got two options:

1. You start screaming and beat him to death with the BIM Execution Plan;
2. You smile wisely, because everything was foreseen in the aforementioned BIM Execution Plan and you have a seamless workflow to perform all needed checks.

2. Grasshopper to Dynamo: the shape

The two things are basically cousins, so they might quarrel from time to time but their mothers will always make sure they love each other or else.

The shape we picked with Vignesh for the demo started as an Alvar Aalto bowl and evolved from there. The beauty of the thing is that if it works with this shape it basically works with every kind of shape. If you’re not familiar with the Littala vases, try and think about the Cottbus University Library by Herzog & De Meuron.

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What you can easily do, is sending shape and levels up and get them down, create them in a mass family. It’s easy. It’s a two-clicks effort.

4. Grasshopper to Dynamo: the panels

Of course there had to be panels, otherwise men would not be satisfied. Also, a naked building is nothing we can show in a protected hour range. Easily enough, what you have is points here and there and Flux likes them a lot.

The tessellation method doesn’t really matter, but for this demo we picked a sort of vertical subdivision with a barcode. It’s the staggered quad panels node from Lunchbox (you can read about that on Proving Ground). Nothing too fancy. It’s a neat little trick when you’re doing brise-soleils, for instance, and I know if would have been super useful when we were doing the new dehor for the Saint-Vincent Resort & Casino with Piero Lissoni. If you don’t believe me, try looking for the Data Center in Parliament Street, Toronto, by WZMH Architects (they did it with bricks).

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To make things a little more interesting, we sliced the rooftop, so you’re faced with placing panels with a multiple amount of vertexes.

It’s a common problem, a problem we’ll always face when somebody is allowed to go around slicing buildings at will.

It’s a particularly common problem in nowadays architecture: you see it present itself on the Deloitte headquarters in Amsterdam, on the most hated Nova Victoria by PLP Architecture, on half of the buildings in Rotterdam, on almost every single building by Frank Gehry and the list could go on for ages. We recently faced it while working on this guy.

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The placing of panels along a diagonally cut edge is a trick we also showcased at the first Dynamo Meetup in Rome, if you’ve been following us around.

5. Mess it up

Up until now, everything is easy. What happens, on the other hand, when somebody starts to mess things up in Revit? That first level that’s not high enough. That curve that we would like to be different.
Well, no worries: once you’ve established a flow of data, no geometry is too tricky. Thank God it’s computational, right?

See you on Tuesday?

It’s going to be fun and you’ll go home with tons of material. Promise.