Complex relationships in museum architecture

Natural light washes the stone interior walls.

Louisiana State Museum and Sports Hall of Fame is designed with 1150 unique stone panels, each with its own set of custom connections.

Located in Natchitoches, Louisiana, the museum, with its fluid spaces, was designed by Trahan Architects in coordination with Method Design and CASE.

Custom tools were developed to coordinate the geometrical relationships. Key to this process was the programming environment of Grasshopper, Karamba, and Geometry Gym, which operated in parallel with Robot structural analysis software and SDS/2 for steel detailing. With this, Method Design developed a system with a feedback response loop and transferred geometrical data across the multiple software.

The result was a fully detailed model of every structural member, support, and connection used to fabricate and install the steel supports and cast stone connections.

David Stasiuk of Method Design commented, "Grasshopper has been the primary design tool for our part in this project's development. Even the parts that are more 'hand' drawn rely heavily on Grasshopper to extract useful information about orientations and then to instantiate those elements of the design that couldn't be generated fully by algorithm."

Details in Arch Daily . . .