README.md

Metabolism

While metabolists saw the built environment as an organism that should continuously be able to adapt to the evolving needs of its habitants, I see semio as a metabolistic tool for the evolving needs of a design 🔀

Let me demonstrate metametabolism on metabolism 🤯

Nakagin Capsule Tower

Theory ... oh my

There are countless ways to formalize a design ♾️

Assuming I would have been Kisho Kurokawa and used semio, I would chosen the following:

Based on this formalization the design can be synthesized the following:

Practice ... yey

A bit overwhelmed? Just take a look at the Grasshopper script nakagin-capule-tower.gh💡

Sketchpad

Grasshopper

Make sure to open Rhino 8 and set the model units to Meter.

After opening the main Grasshopper definition

you will see the following model:

You can easily change the level of detail 🔍

Or the typology 🔁

Or both 🪄

In a conventional block-based approach, block instances have insertion planes and are thus not linked 🪨

Switching from one to another variant would look either like this:

or this:

Due to the port-mechanism of semio, types are not inserted but instead linked 🔗

Further they have metadata attached:

GraphQL

If you go to http://127.0.0.1:5052/graphql/, you can find all the data that stored and query it:

{
  loadLocalKit(directory: "SOMEPARENTDIRECTORY\\examples\\metabolism") {
    kit {
      name
      description
      url
      homepage
      types {
        name
        description
        variant
        unit
        representations {
          url
          lod
          tags
        }
        ports {
          id
          point {
            x
            y
            z
          }
          direction {
            x
            y
            z
          }
          locators {
            group
            subgroup
          }
        }
        qualities {
          name
          value
          unit
          definition
        }
      }
      formations {
        name
        description
        variant
        unit
        pieces {
          id
          type {
            name
            variant
          }
          root {
            plane {
              origin {
                x
                y
                z
              }
              xAxis {
                x
                y
                z
              }
              yAxis {
                x
                y
                z
              }
            }
          }
          diagram {
            point {
              x
              y
            }
          }
        }
        connections {
          connected {
            piece {
              id
              type {
                port {
                  id
                }
              }
            }
          }
          connecting {
            piece {
              id
              type {
                port {
                  id
                }
              }
            }
          }
          offset
          rotation
        }
      }
    }
    error
  }
}

and replace SOMEPARENTDIRECTORY\\examples\\metabolism with your actual directory path then you should see this:

Integrations

Looking closely at the types, you see that representation are not (only) linking to files but instead they link urls. This enables you to use any storage, collaboration and version environment you like (Speckle, Dropbox, OneDrive, GitHub, Nextcloud, Spline, ...) or all of them together 🕸️

Here you can view the models even on your phone 📱

Curious, how it works?

When analyzing the folder structure you see that there is a special file .semio/kit.sqlite3 on the root level. This file is what turns a normal directory into a kit⬆️

│   nakagin-capsule-tower.gh
│   ...
│
├───.semio
│       kit.sqlite3
│
├───icons
│       ...
│       capsule_1.3dm
│       capsule_1.svg
│       ...
│
├───prototypes
│       ...
│       capsule.gh
│       ...
│
└───representations
        ...
        capsule_1.3dm
        capsule_1.glb
        capsule_1_1to200_volume.3dm
        capsule_1_1to500_volume.3dm
        ...

From here, all user-interfaces can access the data over the GraphQL-API ⚡