In our practice as architectural visualisers we are, more often than not, faced with the challenge of representing context buildings.  Although we tend to combine photography and digital painting technique to portray the idea of a context, rather than using a detailed 3D model, sometimes clients do explicitly ask for more precision and “realism”.

Although there are some cool city generators on the market already, they are either too expensive or they are not customisable enough. And here’s exactly where a tool like Rhino’s Grasshopper comes in handy – with ease you can create your own parametric models, introducing addtional elements and functionality as you need them.

So, in this tutorial we won’t be showing you how to create sexy Zaha’esque shapes; in fact we will be showing you how to model something far more ubiquitous and generic- the typical 1960′s office tower. By the way, judging on the popularity of  Zaha’s approach [to architecture] with students and young architects these days, no wonder if one day Phaeno Science Centre becomes as cloned as Seagram Building was back in the 1960′s, that it looks as plain and prosaic as Mies van der Rohe’s masterpiece may appear to us today.

Anyways, in this parametric Grasshopper solution you can control such elements of the building like the floor to floor height, overall height of the tower, the seize of mullionsand the distance between them, slab thickness, spaundrels size, etc. We’ve tried to cover all major elements of the tower typology.

The HD video tutorial ( wmv format, 960×540 pix, 300 MB, 1h:08min ) can be downloaded here > Tut08_generic_tower_in_grasshopper_960x540.wmv

The Rhino and Grasshopper source files used in this tutorial can be downloaded here > Tut08_generic_tower_grasshopper.zip

This tutorial was done in Rhino4.0 SR8 and Grasshopper version 0.6.0059 

Thanks for watching and all comments are highly appreciated!

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This tutorial created  by Vladin Petrov,  Vyonyx Ltd. (c) 2010

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