ThinkParametric

Deconstructing BIG`s Serpentine Pavilion: A Comprehensive Course in Parametric Modelling with Grasshopper

Parametric Modeling

Master the intricacies of Grasshopper, Rhino, FLUX, and Excel to rationalize, visualize, and document architectural designs like the Serpentine Pavilion from BIG Architects.

Arie-Willem de Jongh

Arie-Willem de Jongh

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About this course

In our first few lessons, we’ll start by creating the form of the pavilion and figuring out the workings of the pattern and the stacking of the bricks. We'll go over some methods to get the extrusion lengths for our bricks according to the curvature of the pavilion and we'll figure out how we go from 1600 different types of bricks to only 8 standardized lengths. We’ll end the course by visualizing our pavilion with colors representing the different types of elements and we’ll use FLUX to export our data from Grasshopper to Excel for documentation and collaboration purposes.

Throughout the course, we’ll be keeping a close eye on the organization and order of the bricks. The focus will lie on rationalizing and documenting the different geometrical elements and always keeping constructability in the back of our heads. We'll use Grasshopper not just for visualization purposes, but we'll go one step further and focus on the step towards building a project and the workflow and questions accompanying this.

  • 1.- Creating our two sides of the wall

    10min 17seg
  • 2.- Quick visualization of our wall

    10min 47seg
  • 3.- Relative Tree item explained

    16min 21seg
  • 4.- Extruding our bricks

    12min 52seg
  • 5.- Creating the checkerboard pattern

    15min 08seg
  • 6.- Standardizing the brick lengths

    14min 34seg
  • 7.- Fine-tuning our wall

    14min 10seg
  • 8.- Finding the intersections between the bricks

    13min 57seg
  • 9.- Ordering the intersection data

    15min 50seg
  • 10.- Preparing our master list for exporting to Excel

    21min 19seg
  • 11.- Using colors to visualize the different types of bricks

    15min 56seg
  • 12.- Streaming our information to Excel for documentation

    23min 19seg