CORE studio is Thornton Tomasetti’s firm-wide, virtual incubator of ideas. Its name denotes the union of computational modeling and research and de-velopment, which are at the core of our firm’s mission. Our aim is to develop new workflows and processes with regards to collaboration and information exchange to enhance building design. Collaboration across the Thornton Tomasetti disciplines provides us with an insightful perspective. By analyzing current practices, we envision the optimized workflows of tomorrow.

Our team is a diverse collection of specialists dispersed across the six Thornton Tomasetti practices. Each member brings expert knowledge and an inquiring mind to the project, no matter the size or scope. We strive to act as a collaborative interface between design and build teams.

In the last twelve months, CORE studio assisted more than 90 project teams within Thornton Tomasetti.

Our services include:

- Geometric Rationalization- Interoperability- Fabrication Modeling- Custom Software Development- Building Performance Analysis- Physical Prototyping- Parametric BIM Modeling- Physical Prototyping- Research and Development

CORE@ThorntonTomasetti.comwww.CORE.ThorntonTomasetti.com

PROJECT 2Thornton Tomasetti Practices: StructureProject Team: team

Technical description here. The swooping curves of Rogers Place, in Alberta, Canada, challenged our computational de-signers to find a better way to rationalize its facade panel configuration. The swooping curves of Rogers Place, in Alberta, Canada, challenged our computational designers to find a better way to rationalize its facade panel configuration.

Parametric modeling expedites the exploration of iterations for geometrically complex designs. CORE studio applies ad-vanced parametric modeling tools to realize design intent, manage drawing production, and facilitate fabrication.

PARAMETRIC BIM MODELING

PROJECT 1Thornton Tomasetti Practices: StructureProject Team: team

Technical description here. The swooping curves of Rogers Place, in Alberta, Canada, challenged our computational de-signers to find a better way to rationalize its facade panel configuration. The swooping curves of Rogers Place, in Alberta, Canada, challenged our computational designers to find a better way to rationalize its facade panel configuration.

GEOMETRIC RATIONALIZATION

The rationalization of geometry for envelope surfaces at various scales is critical to efficient structural, environmen-tal and fabrication/ construction performance. Our team implements 3D modeling and advanced form-finding tech-niques to optimize complex surface geometry for design intent and constructability.

Al Ain StadiumThornton Tomasetti Practices: StructureProject Team: 360 Architecture

Al-Ain Stadium is a 25,000 seat stadium built in Al Ain, U.A.E. Thornton Tomasetti provided structural and skin design services stadium, for which most of the structural and facade modeling was done in Rhino and Grasshopper. The stadium features a rain screen made from GFRC panels, which are created from individual molds. CORE studio assisted the build-ing skin team in the rationalization of the panels, aiming to reduce the 480 unique panel shapes down to a manageable 50 individual mold shapes by grouping similar panels. We wrote a custom mold search algorithm that helped the design team to control the quantity of molds needed to panelize the facade, while modifying driving parameters that describe the panel geometries. The tool automatically grouped, color coded and laid out the panels, and helped understand cost implications of the various design iterations.

ROGERS PLACE ARENAThornton Tomasetti Practices: StructureProject Team: 360 Architecture

The swooping, curvilinear form of Rogers Place, in Alberta, Canada, provided a compelling challenge for our computa-tional design team, which was hired by 360 Architects to assist with the arena’s facade modeling and rationalization. Senior Computational Designer Benjamin Howes developed a novel facade rationalization workflow that utilized Kangaroo - a Grasshopper plug-in developed for form finding and physics simulation - to significantly speed up the development of the complex facade and roof geometries. Kangaroo allowed the values of the design and engineering team - target panel sizes, acceptable panel curvature, architectural relationships, etc. - to be encoded as physical forces which are brought into equilibrium during a [Kangaroo] form-finding simulation. Whereas traditional top-down approaches to facade ratio-nalization demand significant amounts of time to optimize any single design iteration (minutes or hours), our bottom-up, physics based approach proved capable of producing suitable results in seconds. This rapid engineering feedback loop allowed the design team to explore a vast number of options earlier in the design process, and to identify entire ranges of buildable design iterations to consider.

FABRICATION MODELING

Communication across design phases facilitates the pro-duction of deliverables for the fabrication and assembly of systems. CORE studio employs a variety of software tools to provide a seamless interface between design, fabrication, and construction teams.

WISHARD HOSPITAL PAVILIONThornton Tomasetti Practices: Structure, SkinProject Team: Diller Scofidio + Renfro, OLIN Studio

At only 13,000 square feet, the Commongound community green space at Wishard Hospital in Indianapolis, Indiana pre-sented large-scale structural challenges. The trellis structure, designed to support native vines, is built with only 1.25-inch steel rods (plants won’t attach to wider rods). To ensure stability of the structure and achieve a fractal-like cable pattern, we used a form-finding “precalculation” of cable geometry to speed up finite element modeling– potentially saving weeks in calculation time. Vierendeel trusses in the corners add lateral stability.

BASRAH SPORTS CITYThornton Tomasetti Practices: Structure, SkinProject Team: 360 Architecture

Thornton Tomasetti provided structural design and building skin services for Basrah Sports City,a multi-use complex. The design-build, fast-track project is the largest of its kind in Iraq. The original skin concept called for 100-foot-long GFRP panels in 10 different configurations; however, the project’s tight schedule necessitated a more efficient design. CORE studio developed a parametric CATIA model to derive and analyze different panel shapes and worked closely with project architects and panel fabricators to decrease the number of molds to five, cutting the fabrication time in half. CORE studio also designed highly adjustable brackets that connect the panels to the ladder columns and accommodate the varying panel sizes and positions. To save time and guarantee model accuracy ,we developed a custom translator that transferred the ladder columns and parametric connection brackets from CATIA into a Tekla model, provided to the fabricator for shop drawing production.

CUSTOM SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT

Commercially available software only gets us so far. The scale and complexity of the projects we work on demands more functionality than the commercial software provid-ers can reasonably justify building - it is too specific to our work. CORE studio’s application development team has evolved to fill this gap, providing custom application development solutions to support the specific needs of our clients and projects. We have developed bespoke plugins and extensions for a wide variety of industry standard authoring applications and analysis tools including Revit, Tekla, CATIA / Digital Project, Autocad, Rhinoceros, Grass-hopper, Dynamo, SAP 2000, ETABS, RAM Structural System, SolidWorks, Inventor, EnergyPlus, RADIANCE, Daysim and many others. We are familiar with various web APIs and database frameworks, and are currently involved in the development of a wide variety of cloud-based solutions.

TT TOOLBOX FOR GRASSHOPPERThornton Tomasetti Practices: Structure, Skin

We constantly leverage Grasshopper’s SDK to extend the platform to suit our needs. CORE studio has developed entire suites of tools to support Grasshopper users within Thornton Tomasetti, and provides a subset of these tools to support the global Grasshopper community.

REVIT TOOLSThornton Tomasetti Practices: Structure

Revit has become the industry standard BIM authoring platform, and CORE studio has developed a suite of Revit exten-sions to support our in-house modelers’ and engineers’ needs. The Revit SDK is leveraged by CORE studio’s dev team to enable interoperablity, automation, custom analysis, and visualization applications, among others.

TEKLA TOOLSThornton Tomasetti Practices: Structure

Thornton Tomasetti’s Construction Support Services practice relies on Tekla for steel and concrete detailing and to collabo-rate with fabricators, and CORE studio is developing a series of Tekla plugins support their work. CORE studio developer Kenny Tam has been working with the CSS team to identify problem domains where computational solutions could prove suitable, and actively prototyping a revolutionary set of steel connection design tools.

ANALYSIS & OPTIMIZATION TOOLSThornton Tomasetti Practices: Structure

Contemporary Structural Engineering practice demands incredibly sophisticated (and often novel) analysis techniques, and generates an enormous amount of engineering data for the engineering team to consider. CORE studio has devel-oped custom analysis, optimization, and data visualization applications on top of our in-house analysis softwares’ APIs to support some of the most complex structural engineering endeavors in practice today.

BUILDING PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS

Sustainable design strategies must be identified and accounted for in the early design phase to realize high performance buildings. By working closely with our Sustain-ability group on one side, and with the software developers creating the analysis packages on the other, we can greatly support teams to analyze and adjust designs, simulate environmental conditions, and prioritize solutions.

CARBON CALCULATORThornton Tomasetti Practices: Sustainability

The CORE studio has developed a large number of tools to fully automated the design of structures at schematic design level. These tools, which we refer to as ‘Generative Structures Suite’ output material sizes, types and quantities for the derived structures. The embodied carbon calculator takes these metrics as inputs to calculate the total amount of embod-ied carbon and embodied energy of any design configuration early in the design phase. By referencing the Inventory of Carbon and Energy Database, we created an array of Grasshopper components, which calculate and visualize embodied carbon contents in real time with the design process. Furthermore, the CORE studio developed plugins for Tekla and Revit that let us take down and track embodied carbon quantities of our detailed BIM models, so that, over time we can estab-lish baseline values for typical carbon quantities based on the different building types and location.

CULTURE SHEDThornton Tomasetti Practices: Structure, Skin, SustainabilityProject Team: Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Rockwell Group

The Culture Shed will be an indoor-outdoor/assembly/performance space. It is composed of two parts - a fixed building that is a gallery space kinetic structure that deploys from the fixed building to cover the neighboring plaza and create a dynamic event space. The Shed’s walls will be clad in pressurized ETFE cushions, a material we proposed based on its minimal weight and high strength The ETFE will be coated with frit patterns that vary depending on the individual ele-ments orientation. The patterns control daylight while minimizing glare and direct radiation into the event space. For our analysis we use a validated, physically accurate light engine called radiance, as well as a number of in house custom developed tools. Our studies on this skin provide an accurate simulation for the designers for both the technical perfor-mance as well as the aesthetic qualities of this landmark project.

PANDAThornton Tomasetti Practices: Sustainability

CORE studio collaborated with our Building Sustainability practice to create a platform that performs concept-level analysis of whole-building energy use and daylighting. The Grasshopper plug-in PANDA (Parametric Analysis of eNergy and Daylight Autonomy) draws on the simulation engines of EnergyPlus, RADIANCE and Daysim to quickly analyze the impacts of design variables such as geometry, floor heights and window-to-wall area ratios. Results are displayed in an easy-to-understand Excel spreadsheet. The PANDA plug-in allows engineers and designers who aren’t sustainability specialists to easily evaluate the environmental ramifications of early design options, so they can make greener choices.

PHYSICAL PROTOTYPING

Need an introduction sentence here. Our work lies at the intersection of design, research, and fabrication. And some help with that sentence.

SAN FRANCISCO KINETIC SCULPTURE

CORE studio installed a kinetic sculpture in the lobby of Thornton Tomasetti’s San Francisco office. All of the kinetic as-semblies were designed, engineered and fabricated in-house. We pushed our little MakerBot 3D printer to the max as it cranked out over 350 custom parts. In just under three days we installed over 150 square feet of backlit plastic to the ceiling. The sculpture’s elements are 3D printed hubs with lightweight carbon fiber rods cantilevering outward. The entire sculpture is controlled via Arduinos and intelligent servo motors that communicate wirelessly to sync their movements. Sensors on the sculpture allow the system to respond to people walking through the heavily trafficked space.

INTEROPERABILITY

Collaboration across design, engineering and build teams demands the coordination of numerous 3D models and software packages. We specialize in the management of BIM and analysis data to streamline the design, analysis, and documentation processes. We offer custom software interoperability and BIM workflow solutions to our clients, as well as our colleagues within Thornton Tomasetti.

TTX INTEROPERABILITY PLATFORMThornton Tomasetti Practices: Structure

The proliferation of design and analysis platforms has made the use of one-to-one translators an increasingly unmanage-able way to collaborate. Industry standard file formats like IFC are a step in the right direction, but are still lacking in some important ways. To respond to these shortcoming, CORE studio has developed TTX, a platform that can “talk” directly to multiple programs, translating data across modeling, analysis and documentation applications. TTX allows project teams to focus on their specialties in the platform of their choice and then update the corresponding models in all other plat-forms. In addition to model updates and translations, users can now leverage project information on a higher level using TTX. Using BIM metadata stored in the TTX database, team members can review project revision history by date, time, user or analysis program; can “roll-back” all models to review an earlier version of the project, can manage the merging of disparate models into one another; and can easily run queries and reports on a wide variety of elements and parameters.

TTX has been used on over 30 Thornton Tomasetti projects since the first Alpha builds were released internally last sum-mer, including some of the most complex projects on our firm’s drawing boards. In addition to in-house use, TTX can be offered as part of a consulting service to our clients.

RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

R&D overview here. Parametric modeling expedites the exploration of iterations for geometrically complex designs. CORE studio applies advanced parametric modeling tools to realize design intent, manage drawing production, and facilitate fabrication.

REMOTE SOLVINGBuilding designs change fast at the beginning of a project. We add value by quickly analyzing and responding to design iterations. To enhance this process, we developed automated workflows that provide engineering analysis on design op-tions in just a fraction of the usual time. We model the project and make it available through an online interface. Clients adjust various aspects of the model then receive a report almost immediately on the basic engineering implications of the changes. Compared to the traditional process, remote solving methods eliminate days – or even weeks – from the time it takes to give our clients the information they need.

PLATYPUSPlatypus allows Grasshopper authors to stream geometry to the web in real time. It works like a chatroom for parametric geometry, and allows for on-the-fly 3D model mashups in the web browser. Multiple [Grasshopper] authors can stream geometry into a shared 3D environment on the web – a Platypus Session – and multiple viewers can join that session on 3dplatyp.us to interact with the 3D model. Platypus can be used to present parametric 3D models to a remote audience, to quickly collaborate with other Grasshopper users, or both!

CORE studioThornton Tomasetti51 Madison AvenueNew York, NY 10010 CORE@ThorntonTomasetti.comwww.CORE.ThorntonTomasetti.com

Send us an email if you would like to collaborate or learn more about our services. We would love to stop by your office to present our latest work or lead a training session. We want to hear from you!