Expanding the Parametric Domain
The Monterrey Football Stadium & Custom Design Tools
Gil Akos & Ronnie Parsons - Studio Mode


In collaboration with the Populous design team, Studio Mode developed a custom model and digital design environment for a new football stadium in Monterrey, Mexico. This project involved the iterative development of the stadium’s overall form, skin, and associated surface geometry, including material break-lines and “gilled” apertures. The unique challenges presented by the design objectives suggested the development of a parametric yet easily adaptable model to be used by the in-house design team for the schematic through design development phases. In order to facilitate the use of a non-restrictive design tool while maintaining precise control over both fixed and yet undefined constraints, we utilized and further customized Grasshopper, a freely distributed parametric plug-in for Rhinoceros.

The project was undertaken in three phases allowing a concurrent development of both the stadium geometry and the design environment in which the parametric model would be interfaced. As the design team further refined the overall geometry, new information from the skin and structural engineering teams that impacted the design was able to quickly and efficiently be assimilated into the parametric model. While new technical strategies of including those constraints were necessary in order to address the changing design of the stadium, each development of the parametric domain was necessarily tempered by the usability concerns of the fast-moving design team. The controls of the model included both abstract numeric sliders as well as driver curves based in a 1:1 metric, relating the stadium geometry directly to its parametric definitions. In accessing the openNURBS library of Rhinoceros through the creation of scripted nodes in VisualBasic DotNet, we were able to create a fully dynamic parametric model and extend its potential for design. Our developmental methodologies for the model, while empowered by the parametric platform, required the use of these custom and scripted nodes to meet the team’s design agenda. Thus, the extension and resulting adaptability of Grasshopper were of utmost importance in maintaining usability by the design team while enabling the production of a desired geometrical form.

It is our supposition that the extension of a parametric environment and consequent expansion of design parameters offers us as designers a robust model for the development of design scenarios. Furthermore, we propose that the design objectives in this project could not have been achieved without the parallel development of the project and model by separate entities, which exemplifies in itself a parametric mode of designing.