Exercise: Parametric tower

In this tutorial, we will construct a tower model controlled by a set of parameters in Grasshopper. In this first of four exercises, we will focus on the basic form of the tower.

Step 1: Design concept and strategy

As with any design process, when approaching a new computational design problem it is useful to spend some time thinking through the problem you are trying to solve and formulating a concept and approach to guide your design process. Most Grasshopper tutorials only focus on the what of computational design, with step-by-step instructions describing the process of building a particular model. This can teach you some useful tools and approaches but misses the critical points of how to think about design problems computationally, and why we might want to do this in the first place.

When formulating a concept for your model, a good approach is to first sketch what you want to achieve and then “reverse engineer” it to figure out how to build it. In this case, I want to create a twisting tower with parameters to control the amount of twist as well as the height of the tower and the shape of the floors. I can start by sketching out what I think a twisting tower might look like. Don’t spend too long on these sketches, they don’t need to be especially detailed or of high artistic quality. Nonetheless, they are important…