Another tutorial we’ve analysed together with ARCH362 students last week was the one that mimics Zaha Hadid’s Kartal Masterplan. Although the project of Zaha Hadid was pretty much controversial among Turkey’s architectural critics (and most people also), we’re not dealing with how successful or “ugly” it is, but the most simple version of the technique that generated such forms. We have a term “çakma” in Turkish that means “conscious imitation, possibly full of errors”. But however, this “çakma Kartal Project” example has a pedagogical intention that a technique or concept could be very effectively learned if we relate it with a “real”, and preferably “realized” example.

This simple definition is just an exercise of the “curve closest point” component, which calculates the closest distance between a point and a curve. Here is the Grasshopper definition (don’t left click, right-click and select “save as”) [GHX: 0.9.0076] and a dummy Rhino file to test it [3DM: Rhino 5]