Patterns and Zoned Porosity

I keep messing around with this shape, there’s some kind of special something to it that I haven't figured out yet.

It shows up in lots of places.  I’ve been looking at this one for a while, the Jean Nouvel Louvre project.  It uses several layers of this shape in a patterned screen, then varies the size of the frame and the overall shape to create different levels of porosity

Similar idea in his Doha Tower project.

And I like this one by SOM, a Mosque in Bahrain, which uses a similar approach to patterning.

Although the unit has a little variation to it (thanks Neil!) with the octagonal center.

So I got to wondering if you could set up multiple layers of this pattern in Revit, and then control the permeability of the layers to follow some programmatic requirement. 

For instance, I want to make the lower lobby of a building façade very open, a closed mezzanine, the rest being open except for some specialty space part way up.

First need to make a star shaped panel with variable tube radius.

By layering divided surfaces on top of each other, you can create the “same” density variation, just at different resolutions. (This sketch was just the concept of variable resolutions, it doesn’t match the zoning idea)

Taking a little care on the “resolution” of the grid to make sure the patterns don’t align or create secondary patterns.  For instance, a 5x10 grid on top of a 20x40 grid would align every 4th cell.  It needs to have a pattern that doesn’t coincide with another.

Using a bitmap that follows the same proportion of the façade, and applied to 3 different densities of curtain panel

Resulting in

Repeated on 3 densities of divided surface

So it isn’t perfect, there needs to be some refinement of the spacing  to more create more definition of the open and closed areas.  But it starts to get the idea of creating zoned porosity with this method.