Deconstructing BIG`s Serpentine Pavilion: A Comprehensive Course in Parametric Modelling with Grasshopper

About this course

In our first few lessons, we’ll start by creating the form of the pavilion and figuring out the workings of the pattern and the stacking of the bricks. We'll go over some methods to get the extrusion lengths for our bricks according to the curvature of the pavilion and we'll figure out how we go from 1600 different types of bricks to only 8 standardized lengths. We’ll end the course by visualizing our pavilion with colors representing the different types of elements and we’ll use FLUX to export our data from Grasshopper to Excel for documentation and collaboration purposes.

Throughout the course, we’ll be keeping a close eye on the organization and order of the bricks. The focus will lie on rationalizing and documenting the different geometrical elements and always keeping constructability in the back of our heads. We'll use Grasshopper not just for visualization purposes, but we'll go one step further and focus on the step towards building a project and the workflow and questions accompanying this.