The Serpentine Pavilion 2016 was designed by Bjarke Ingles Group, which was parametrically formed to represent an “unzipped” wall creating a long interior space within the units making up the wall. It was fabricated using extruded fiberglass frames assembled in a typical brick pattern to emphasize the concept of creating space within a wall. Using Grasshopper and parametric design principals, in this project the pavilion was reimagined in order to understand its design strategy step by step.
PSEUDOCODE
For my pseudocode and preliminary parametric strategy, I knew I wanted to build one wall first and then repeat the process for the second before merging the two geometries. I wanted to ensure that each step of the geometry remained parametric, so everything could be adjustable. Everything amount of columns and rows of boxes, to their heights and widths are parametric, along with the range in length of each extrusion.
GRASSHOPPER SCRIPT
As with the pseudocode, I began the script with one wall, creating all the points to make up what will later be the blocks of the wall using the series component. After shaping the double curve using two Graph Mappers I then moved on to defining the points. Since the geometry gives the illusion of a masonry wall “unzipping” into two, I needed to cull in order to isolate every other point to have alternating blocks. Then I continued on to create the curves, which were made to be adjustable in both height and width to customize the block sizes. Finally, the curves were extruded and the process was repeated for the second wall, with some components inverted before merging the two geometries into one.
WALL 01
WALL 02
FULL SCRIPT
FINAL RENDERS
ANIMATION VIDEO
