Metropol Parasol

[Bricklyne Clarence]

Hello all,

Sometime back I recently came across this project and was fascinated by it.
Sometime shortly after that I came across an article ( I believe it was on Architosh) that claimed the project was conceived and designed entirely in ArchiCAD.

Now looking at the construction completion date as well as extrapolating from what the design period would be, it doesn't seem likely that this was a project that was done using ArchiCAD 15, whose new modeling tools would seem like a good or great candidate for such a project.

In fact it says that Jurgen Mayer (the architect) won the competition to design it way back in 2004.

That would have been around ArchiCAD 9 or 10.

Now my question is, assuming it's true that this project was done in ArchiCAD, does anyone know how they did it without ArchiCAD 15's new modeling tools (And assuming they weren't using some special beta version), because I just can't see how you can pull this off with ArchiCAD 14 or any of the earlier versions.

My own experience with various software informs my that to complete such a project I would probabaly use some combination of Maya (or 3ds MAX) to develop the overall form and then something like Rhinoceros 3D to translate those undulating organic forms into something that can be frabricated for assembliy on site.


Does anyone have any clue how this project was done, if it was done in ArchiCAD?


http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/6y3i2Q/urbanpeek.com/2011/08/04/metropol-parasol/

[Bricklyne Clarence]

If I had to guess, I would imagine their workflow went from ArchiCAD to Maya to Rhino to ArchiCAD.

The article mentions ArchiCAD and Maya specifically but I've read elsewhere where they mentioned Rhino as well - and it would make sense since Maya is not particularly good for producing fabrication data.


I think they built the context (site) in ArchiCAD along with the basic 2D Layout information for the final sheets, and then used the basic context massing to proportion and act as a base in Maya where the actual undulating form was modeled (using either Poly/SubD modeling or Maya Nurbs modelling) and then the non-sliced form was exported to Rhino where it was cleaned up and then sliced using either a Grasshopper definition or Rhino-scripting to spit out Nested 2D profile or contour curves that could be annotated or numbered and outputted for CNC milling or routing.

At least that's the workflow I used myself when I worked on a similar project

I doubt they re-imported the sliced model back into ArchiCAD (too many polygons for ArchiCAD to handle) but I could see them re-importing the finished Maya model (pre-slicing) back into AC as a "dead" or static geometry for use in their documentation for permit application and site-placement.
They might not even have had to do that as long as they would have been able to extract 2D curves describing the contours of the overall form in plan and Elevation (section) and exported/imported those as DWG or pdf format.

Given the timeline, it's also highly unlikely they used anything later than ArchiCAD 13 for this project since it goes back almost 2 years long before AC 15 was even in Beta (I imagine).

[Anonymous]

I rescue this post... I'm developing a small gdl library to make freeform, and i remember this post so I try to make something like metropol... and its very easy, only few clicks, not need to program anything...


By garquitectos at 2012-04-16