COMMERCIAL SCALE 04 — BUILDING Rhino.Compute 2025 · In Progress

Commercial Tower

3,472 parametric facade panels driven by solar radiation and fabrication logic.

OVERVIEW

The brief was familiar: a 40-story mixed-use tower in Istanbul's Maslak business district. The challenge was also familiar: how to make it anything other than another sealed glass box in a sea of sealed glass boxes.

We approached this as a Generative Facades research application. Rather than designing a facade and then assigning panels, we let solar radiation data, view cone analysis, and fabrication constraints generate the skin. The result is 3,472 unique aluminum panels whose aperture ratios range from 12% (south, high floors) to 68% (north, lower floors), optimized for daylight, thermal load, and view quality.

Vertical gardens at floors 10, 20, and 30 create communal "sky lobbies"—outdoor atriums that break the vertical isolation typical of supertall buildings.

THE CHALLENGE

Design a LEED Platinum tower in a dense urban context that mitigates urban heat island effect, provides outdoor spaces at height, and achieves 35% energy reduction vs. local code baseline—while keeping facade fabrication cost within 15% premium.

OUR APPROACH

Research-Driven Design

Solar Radiation Mapping

We mapped annual cumulative solar radiation (kWh/m²) across all facade surfaces using Ladybug. South facade receives 1,420 kWh/m²; north facade receives 380 kWh/m². This 3.7× differential drove our variable solution-to-window ratio (SWR) strategy.

Parametric Panel Generation

A Grasshopper script (now part of our FraktalMCP examples) generated 3,472 unique panel variations. Key constraint: all panels share the same outer frame (1.2m × 2.4m) to reduce fabrication tooling; only the inner aperture varies. This kept the cost premium at 12%.

AI-Assisted Form Testing

Using our AI Form Finding methodology, we tested 48 massing variants in 2 days—vs. the typical 2-week manual process. The final massing (twisted floor plates, 3° rotation per floor) emerged from trading off solar self-shading against structural efficiency.

Wind Comfort CFD

CFD analysis (OpenFOAM) identified downdraft zones at the northwest corner. We mitigated this by adding a 4m porous screen canopy at ground level and adjusting the podium geometry to redirect airflow.

RESULTS