Istanbul Street Parametrics

Spirograph toys for sale at the Sultan Ahmet station in Istanbul,Turkey.

Spirograph patterns generated with grasshopper.

Download the definition here

Cairo Attractor

A diamond grid locally distorted by a cairo attractor


The moving attractor

Download the definition here

Cairo Tiling

This pentagonal tesselationis called cairo tiling.

3D2REAL: A wall based on the cairo tesselation, designed and build by ILEK students.

Extension of the congress center Davos, currently under construction. The roof structure is based on the cairo tesselation. By Degelo Architekten, Engineer: Dr. Schwartz Consulting

The cairo pattern seems to be a blend of a diamond pattern and a chinese pattern.

Download the definition here.

Sun-Shade Machine

Inspired by Frei Otto's sun-shade machine, this grasshopper definiton generates the shadow of mesh objects for a given geographical location, date, and time. North is in positive y-direction.

Download the file here

"The sun-shade machine, [...] is an extremly flexible tool for determining in the first phase of planning the areas of insolation and shade. [...] the sun-shade machine offers an infinitely variable adjustment for three parameters: geographical location, month, nd time of the day." IL 30 Vela, Toldos, sun and shade (1986)

Armillary Sphere

An armillary sphere is a model of the celestrial sphere. The drawing is from Christoph Clavius commentary on the book De Sphaera from 1581.

This grasshopper definition generates the position of ecliptic and sun for a given time, timezone and date at a given position on earth. The real position of the sun deviates from this position by approx. +/- 15 min. The reason is the eccentricity of the earths's orbit around the sun. (see equation of time).

Download the grasshopper definition here

Dreidle Urbanism

Tracking the tip of a dreidle with processing, and then sending the coordinate data via udp to grasshopper.

Dreidle City in time lapse. Inspired by parmetric urbanism.

Download the definition files here. Udp sending and receiving based on Luis Fraguada's definition.

Tracking with Processing and Grasshopper

I threw a marble in an iron wok and tracked the motion, using brightness tracking in processing. Then I sended the coordinates of the marble via udp as a list to grasshopper.

The path remindes me of harmonograph curves.


Download the files here. The grasshopper definition is based on Luis Fraguada's work, I used his grasshopper udp receiver and adapted it.