Seattle Public Library_Dylan Davis

LunchBox is a plug-in for Grasshopper used in the lab to study the Seattle Public Library, designed by Rem Koolhaas.  The glass and steel building consists of several floating platforms wrapped in a large steel net around a glass skin.  The floating boxes represent different program within the building, each possessing its own width, length, number of floors, and floor to floor height.  The building's shape was created based off Koolhaas' philosophy that the building's functions should dictate the form, instead of the structure.

By creating an excel spreadsheet with each program and its calculated dimensions, Excel Reader in Lunchbox can pull specific data and utilize it within the grasshopper script.  For lab, we pulled the width, number of floors, and floor to floor height of each space from the excel spreadsheet and made overlapping boxes.  Then by adding up all the heights with Mass Addition, a list can be created with the start height of each programatic piece.  These values are then used as vectors to stack each of the boxes.  Although with Rem Koolhaas' design, he removed the kids space, living room, mixing chamber, and reading room within his building.  These spaces were to be represented as more transparent.  Replace Items component was used in order to edit the list made and remove these unwanted boxes.  Rem Koolhaas didn't just leave theses floating forms perfectly stacked, but staggered them to create a better aesthetic.  The Random component with move is able to generate different iterations of the floating boxes.

LunchBox becomes very useful when applying pre-determned sets of dimensions, such as modules or, in this case, programatic placement.  The driver for design is derived by numbers within an excel spreadsheet and is an asset in Functionalist architecture.

-Dylan Davis