Parametric Tower inspired by ZHA
Build a ~900-component Grasshopper definition of a parametric tower inspired by Zaha Hadid Architects' Central Bank of Iraq, across three live sessions. The course centers on advanced data tree manipulation, taking you from a single facade panel to a complete tower with glass infill and parametric frames.
Instructor Lazar Djuric uses this project as a structured lesson in how to think parametrically. Each step is introduced with a hand-drawn diagram before any components are placed, so you always know why a step is needed before you build it. The sessions cover the single facade element (paired rectangles at five heights, rotation, stretching, mirroring, and corner adjustments), sorting branches in circular order, constructing vertical NURBS curves, and creating the glass facade surfaces.
A key theme throughout is making the definition universal: every sorting step uses a manually constructed circle with a fixed base plane rather than the output of a Circle Fit, so the script behaves consistently regardless of the rotation angle slider. The final script has roughly 900 components and demonstrates techniques that carry over to any facade paneling project.
- How to design a multi-height facade panel element using pairs of rectangles, Mass Addition for cumulative heights, and Split Tree for selective rotation
- How to calculate a rotation vector from extracted corner points and sorted distance comparisons to align panel pairs to a facade direction
- How to use the Stretch component with projected axis lines to taper the bottom rectangles of each panel element
- How to sort 56+ facade branches into a consistent circular order using Sort Along Curve and Path Mapper renumbering
- How to construct vertical NURBS curves by swapping second-level branch indices with item indices using path mapper transpose
- How to merge adjacent top surfaces using Region Union on face edges extracted with the Edge From Face component
- How to fillet parametric polylines, offset them inward, and loft their naked edges to create 3D top-cap extrusions
- How to remove degenerate surfaces using an area threshold filter and use Clean Tree to strip null entries
