Virtual World: ARCH 655

Project 1

In this project the objective was to create a landmark using Grasshopper and Rhino.

My selected project is Toyo Ito's Taichung Metropolitan Opera House :

Reference: http://www.arcspace.com/features/toyo-ito--associates/taichung-metropolitan-opera-house/

Reference: http://www.curbed.com/2016/9/30/13126548/toyo-ito-taichung-metropolitan-opera-house-taiwan

Reference: http://www.curbed.com/2016/9/30/13126548/toyo-ito-taichung-metropolitan-opera-house-taiwan

I started by making one of the modules that make up the building.

In order to do so, I drew a rectangle as a base plane using the grasshopper node : Rectangle

Next, the rectangle's vertices and its center should be found to be used as centers of the polygons. (Polygons are to be subtracted from the base plane)

Using the Explode and Area nodes, we can obtain vertices and midpoint respectively.

In the above image you can see the rectangle plane and polygons made by the Polygon node.

After that, by the use of Surface Split node, we can subtract the polygons from the base plane.

Then, by the use of Brep node, we can find the curves resulted from the intersection of the two aforementioned forms.

The curves should be joined, then each one of them needs to be called out, moved in the z direction and scaled to make the loft.

After joining the curves, by the use of List Item and Number Slider node, we are able to select the targeted curve among the others, the same procedure should be done for the points and relative point can then e found to work as a center when scaling the curve.

The same process is repeated for other curves and other lofts are made:

One important thing to mention is that all Move nodes should be connected to the same set of nodes which is a Multiplication of unit Z. The reason for that is to be able to move all the parts in Z direction accordingly.

For the second floor, we can create the base surface by moving the rectangle 1 unit in Z direction and subtracting the curves from it by the use of surface split.

On the second surface though, we need to find the midpoint of each strait line between two curves which will be used as a center for making the new curves.

The midpoints can be selected by the use of Point on Curve node, set to 0.5. We can use the rectangle in the first floor to find the points and then move them to the 2nd floor. By using Polygon node, and the points as centers we can get the model below.

The polygons are subtracted from the surface using the same process that was mentioned above.

The curves are moved, scaled and lofted in the same way.

The 3rd floor can be made by simply moving the 2nd floor in Z direction, or subtracting the curves from the rectangle plane as shown in the image below.