Design & Make: Arborescent Vault

“Design & Make: Arborescent Vault” is an intermediate level Grasshopper 3d workshop, that focuses on the design, analysis and fabrication of a catenary dome pavilion, in full scale. Over the course of this workshop, we will work towards the design of an intricate Vault, with a pleated self supporting structure. We will be going further than simple geometry creation, into the preparation of fabrication files within manufacturing tolerences, the stability analysis and optimization. During the course of this class, you will delve deep into visual programming with Grasshopper3d and a series of plugins and learn to work with definitions of high complexity, while aiming to solve real design problems for construction.
This 4 days event is designed for everyone who is interested in building up on their computational design skills, with a focus on design analysis and optimisation, for the purposes of digital fabrication. During these days, you will gain a solid basis on process-oriented and physics-based design, you will gain access to a wide range of form-finding tools and techniques and you will learn ways of preparing your ideas for prototyping and fabrication.

Course Outline

In this training course (“Design & Make: Arborescent Vault”) you will learn to create and control grasshopper definitions of increased complexity and get a good knowledge of generative modeling. The workshop is considered intemediate level. A prior knowledge of basic grasshopper functionality is advised. A series of grasshopper plugins will be presented, most notably Kangaroo 2, by Daniel Piker, Ivy, Human and Fabtools. Information will be presented at an accelerated pace.
The duration of the course is 32 hours. The course is intensive and spans two consecutive days of design training (10:00 to 19:00, with a 1 hour lunch-break at 14:30), one day oriented towards the design of our target project and one final day of fabrication and assembly.

Structure

The course will begin with a series of warm up exercises on data trees management, transformations, mesh conversion and subdivision, but will quickly move onto physics based modeling, mesh topology and graph theory. Taking into account that this is a Design & Make workshop, most tutorials are directly linked to the creation of the final object. All theoretical concepts are going to be presented in connection to the design problems, as they arise.

Expected Outcomes

Over the course of this workshop, students will:

• Get introduced to physics based modeling, with kangaroo.
• Learn to combine goals in creating the optimum physics simulation for their model.
• Generate catenary structures, where form is dictated by the objects stress lines.
• Optimise their design for stability, planarity and rigidity.
• Analyze, segment and unroll a mesh.
• Setup and control your layer structure directly from within grasshopper.

  

  

  
  

  

  

  
  

• Learn how to segment their model in stripes and unroll them for fabrication.
• Explore the differences between tri and quad mesh modelling, with regards to both morphology and fabrication.
• Learn how to create cut files from their unrolled mesh strips, with flaps and hole placement for the joints, taking into account material thickness and tolerences.
• Get a hands-on experience on the design and fabrication workflow of creating a generative object.
• Use cutting contemporary digital fabrication techniques in creating a full scale model.

Curriculum

At decode™ we believe effective training needs an intriguing goal instead of generic exercises. Most of the tutorials will be presented as part of a design process, in which we will be doing structural analysis and redesigning well-acclaimed architectural projects, as well as creating new objects from scratch. In this way each student will be guided through the process of completing a set of challenging and interesting design projects, leading up to the final design goal.

During the 32-hour course, the following concepts will be covered:

• Kangaroo forces & goals.
• Various ways of controling a rhino file directly through Grasshopper.
• Operators.
• Analysis of geometry and parameter extraction.
• Mesh topology.
• Boolean operations and conditionals
• Mesh graphs.

• Intricate tagging and layering.
• Pattern generation.
• Warp/ Weft face directionality.
• Triangulation algorithms.
• Quad planarization.
• Unrolling, nesting and tagging for fabrication.

Pre-requisites

Requires Windows skills and desire to create. Previous rhino3d modeling experience is deemed greatly helpful but not required. A previous grasshopper3d experience is strongly advised. A general understanding of basic physical and mathematical principles is also considered helpful, but an explanatory lecture will be given where needed.

All participants are required to have:

• Their personal laptop with them. Additional NUC computers can be provided after timely communication.
• Rhinoceros3d V6.0 pre-installed. You can download a 90-days evaluation version from www.rhino3d.com/download . Grasshopper now comes pre-installed within Rhino 6!
• Lots of patience and positive thinking, learning is fun after all!

________________________________________________________________________________________________
Photos by Katerina Christina Anastassopoulou.