Parametric Tower: Karlatornet by SOM
Recreate the twisting facade logic of Karlatornet in Grasshopper, building a fully parametric tower with custom facade panels and floor-by-floor twisting using the Flexibility plugin.
Instructor Lazar Djuric uses Karlatornet as the design reference to demonstrate how a real-world complex tower form can be broken down into parametric logic in Grasshopper. The course starts from a single point and a base rectangle, builds up a 2D floor plan, then stacks and twists it vertically using alignment vectors and rotation planes.
The facade is then populated with custom panels derived from the tower's ruled surfaces. You learn how to control the orientation of the base plane, how to parameterize both the number of floors and the twist angle, and how to loft pairs of curves at each floor level to produce closed, watertight building geometry. The course focuses heavily on data tree management for panel geometry generation.
- How to set up a rotatable base plane using alignPlane and setVector for flexible project orientation
- How to create a 2D grid of floor-plan points and stack them vertically to produce a 3D point grid
- How to control building twist using rotation planes across the height of the tower
- How to use the Flexibility plugin to drive and animate the twist behavior per floor level
- How to loft pairs of vertical curves to generate ruled facade surfaces
- How to manage multi-level data trees (grafting, flattening, simplifying) for panel geometry
- How to produce clean, closed building geometry from floor curves using loft options
- How to build a fully slider-driven parametric tower where floor count, panel width, and twist angle update in real time
