Accordion Bus Stop

This bus stop is designed to react specifically to the amount of time left for the bus to arrive.  The aspect of the bus stop that changes is the area that it covers.  As the bus gets closer to the stop, the shelter accordions out to allow for more people to congregate under its shelter.  This occurs in the screen on the wall of the bus stop as well as the angled roof structure sheltering the bus patrons. 

The grasshopper script that I built to run this splits the shelter into three different components: The middle portion of the screen, the top and bottom layers of the screen, and the roof structure of the stop.  The screen layers work the same way in that a line is drawn from the anchor point of the bus stop and extends out from 5’ to a maximum of 30’.  This line is divided into 10 sections, and then those points are then made into lines along the base curve.  From there, the midpoints of each line are extracted and offset from the base line based off of an inverse formula to make the points move further away from the line as the line became shorter to allow for the accordion affect.  The midpoints were then joined by lines and assigned rectangular profiles. 

From here, the points on the base curve became the structural columns for the screen and roof to attach to.  This is where the separation of the top and bottom layers of the screen comes into play.  The lines for the columns were drawn between these two layers, and then piped to act as circular columns in the system.  The roof structure is then laid on top of these columns by applying a rectangular profile to a sloped line.  Then the midpoint of these rectangular members is evaluated on the front and back of the members, made into a curve, and then lofted together in the same way that the layered elements of the screen were.  This creates an accordion roof structure that is flexible enough to allow for the expansion and contraction of the station.