Adaptive everything

We <3 the Geometry Gym Plugins for Grasshopper Grasshopper-designed roof of the Al Menna Sports Complex in Iraq. The smart structural interpreter (ssi) tools for Grasshopper changed the way that we engineers look at modeling. We first tested the ssi plugin in 2010, when we were searching for the fastest possible way to design a stadium roof structure with SAP. Our challenge was to submit a detailed set of drawings for a competition proposal for the fabric roof system of the Al Menaa Sports Complex in Iraq. We spent three days at the offices of 360 Architects , sitting together to generate a parametric model of the roof that would allow us to study different design scenarios, both from an architectural and structural perspective. On day four, we used the ssiSAP interpreter to assign structural material properties to our wireframe geometry, and then to ‘bake’ this into SAP to run analyses. The analysis in SAP is set up relatively quickly for a project such as this – the bulk o...