Facade geometry on The Broad Museum by Diller Scofidio & Renfro

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Permalink Reply by Birk Binnard on October 9, 2016 at 6:53pm

Hi James - I have been to the Broad and it is an impressive building for sure.  I did some re-work on your GH file to be completely self contained and allow for a variable number of panels.  Mapping the flat panels onto a curved surface requires the Jackalope add-on.  I used a simple arc for the curved surface shape.

Also, the holes in the actual panels are not centered as they are in my design, but this should be an easy fix by simply moving the inner rectangle to the desired location.

3D printing the resulting geometry will be difficult because it will require lots of supports if you use a standard hot plastic FDM type printer. You could try printing it on edge, but even doing that the unsupported gaps in the holes could get problematic. A better method might be one of the the laser/resin types of printers, provided you can get access to one. 

Attachments:

• TheBroad-bb.gh, 18 KB

Permalink Reply by James Ness on October 10, 2016 at 8:01am

Hi Birk,

Many thanks for your reply. There are a few things in your updated script that I have not used before so thanks for highlighting them. Do you know how to fillet the edge highlighted in the above photo by any chance?

In terms of 3D printing I have access to several that print support so I can have overhanging surfaces like the existing cladding panel on The Broad.

Thanks,

James

Permalink Reply by Birk Binnard on October 10, 2016 at 8:20am

Hi James - I'm glad you found my layout helpful. Filleting is tricky to do for 2 reasons:

1. Finding a GH filleting component that actually works is hard to do.

2. Rhino has problems exporting an STL file that has fileted surfaces.

I've found solutions that resolve these problems for designs I've made, but these were for much simpler geometry, so they may not work for you. I'll dig up that info and post it here in a few hours.

Permalink Reply by Birk Binnard on October 10, 2016 at 12:08pm

Here is the link to get to the GH filleting component I've found to be the easiest to use.

http://www.neoarchaic.net/resources/grasshopper/basic-fillet-surface/

Basically you give it the 2 surfaces you want to fillet and a point on each surface that indicates which way you want the fillet to go.  Essentially you have to tell it which direction is inside and which is outside. DOing that takes a bit of fussing because inside and outside are not always obvious

The other problem you'll encounter once you get the filleting done is exporting the resulting geometry from Rhino as an STL file. What happens is the curved surfaces that form the fillet end up as faceted ones with corners instead of smooth curves.   This seems to be an obscure problem that is not well known, but I did find a fix for it after a lot of searching.

The fix is to apply the Rhino "DivideAlongCreases" command to your entire set of geometry. This may or may not change the way the geometry looks in Rhino, but at least for me it produces smooth curved surfaces in the exported STL file, and these surfaces print fine.

It will be interesting to see how these fixes work for your geometry.  Good luck! 

Permalink Reply by Chris Grieve on March 16, 2020 at 12:37am

Hi James,

I am doing a precedent study for a subject on digital design and my Building was the Broad, there is lots of information on the building, but not so much on the digital design processes used...I was wondering if you managed to get your script to work in the end?

Thanks 

Chris