Shanghai Tower _LINA LEE
Date: August 26, 2013

Shanghai tower is the tallest mixed-use building in China that offers a sustainable way of living in vertical cities, with a unique mix of restaurants, shops, offices and hotels spaced through the building. It is a super high-rise building wrapped entirely from top to bottom in public spaces and sky gardens. The tower is divided vertically into nine zones, each with 12 to 15 floors. An inner cylindrical tower steps in at each zone, similar to a wedding cake.

In order to create the structure of wedding cake shape building, I used Grasshopper which is scripting language that works with Rhino. It allows me to create different kinds of variable inputs including numeric value or piece of geometry for the modeling. The first variable input is radius of the circle and the overall heights of the building. This controls the size, maximum heights of the building, each of different layers of building. Next step, we need to create series of number that will subtract or make smaller from original of the circle using scale tool and extrude elements. To sum up, creating wedding cake shape, we need the series of 4 inputs: step size, number of layers, overall heights of the building and base radius.

Some of different inputs we need to create exterior twisting shape of the building. We can make curve input from Rhino and back to grasshopper make set one curve. This curve is scaled, rotated, moved and lofted in order to match the wedding cake shifting of the overall geometry.