Brief

By represent the design process of soumaya museum’s facade, the project exploed the possibility of Grasshopper as a power tool to solve the problem in the real design and construction process. Furthermore, by animating the generation process, to learn a better method to display the design ideas to others.

Reference Project: Soumaya Museum

Programmed and designed by FR-EE, the museum reflects the eclectic taste of the collector, as well as his desire to create a new cultural institution for the public and the city.

The 150-foot tall structure rises at the heart of a new cultural and commercial district, Plaza Carso, also planned and designed by FR-EE. The museum’s form, a rotated rhomboid supported by 28 curved steel columns of varying size and shapes, is clad in a skin of 16,000 hexagonal mirrored-steel elements which reference the traditional colonial ceramic-tiled building facades and gives the museum a diverse appearance depending on the weather, time of day and the viewer’s vantage point, while optimizing the preservation and durability of the entire building.

Soumaya Museum, grasshopper, iaac, computation design, MAA01 liang mayuqi

Soumaya Museum, Curated by Daniela Cruz

Deconstructing Facade

Planarization is always a difficult problem in real construction process, especially for hexagonal panel. The construction team of Soumaya museum applied circle packing algorithm to design torsion free nodes. The final hexagonal panels also reflect the algorithm they used.

In my script, I apply two different defination to represent the facade: the frist one is more closes to the one that construction team used. And the other one is comparatively simple, which just use the original hexagonal meshes.

Soumaya Museum, grasshopper, iaac, computation design, MAA01 liang mayuqi,Rhino

Defination 1(Circle Packing)

Soumaya Museum, grasshopper, iaac, computation design, MAA01 liang mayuqi,Rhino

Defination 2(Extract Original Hexagon)

Pseudo Code

The main modeling process are three steps:

  1. Initially, generate the triangular meshes based on the original hexagonal meshes.
  2. Then, optimize the  shape with kangaroo to optain a final shape that has proper Gaussian curvature.
  3. Lastly, accroding to the different defination, generate the new hexagonal meshes and project them into corresponding planes to optain the final hexagonal panels.
Soumaya Museum, grasshopper, iaac, computation design, MAA01 liang mayuqi,Rhino

Pseudo Code for Two Defination

Script

Soumaya Museum, grasshopper, iaac, computation design, MAA01 liang mayuqi,Rhino

GH Script for Facade

Generation Process

Soumaya Museum, grasshopper, iaac, computation design, MAA01 liang mayuqi,Rhino

Defination 1

Soumaya Museum, grasshopper, iaac, computation design, MAA01 liang mayuqi,Rhino

Defination 2

Comparison Between Two Defination

With different defination, the fanal results will have slightly difference at the boundary part.

Soumaya Museum, grasshopper, iaac, computation design, MAA01 liang mayuqi,Rhino

Comparation between Two Defination

Configurations

By changing the input parameters, such as the boundary curves, the final outputs also change corespondingly.

Soumaya Museum, grasshopper, iaac, computation design, MAA01 liang mayuqi,Rhino

Configurations with Different Parameters

Render

Soumaya Museum, grasshopper, iaac, computation design, MAA01 liang mayuqi,Rhino

Render

Animation

 

Animated Systems: Soumaya Museum  is a project of the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia developed at Master in Advanced Architecture in 2020/2021 by:
Student: Liang Mayuqi
Faculty: Rodrigo Aguirre | Faculty Assistant: Ashkan Foroughi