Left: a large tiled pattern of triangles in varying shading, with white and hatched triangles forming clusters; right: a Grasshopper visual programming screenshot with three sliders labeled Sand, Silt, and Clay set to 0.70, 0.12, and 0.10.

Soil Language v2: Algorithmic Translation

The manual translation has shown great potential to interpret scientific data into the diagrammatic drawings for different soil conditions. However, the complex soil composition requires non-neglectable efforts to produce such drawings, and the interpreted information affects the drawings in different scales. A computation toolset is thus needed to automatically map the numeric data, such as soil composition ratio, water percentage, etc. to a defined drawing system.

Left: a large tiled pattern of triangles in varying shading, with white and hatched triangles forming clusters; right: a Grasshopper visual programming screenshot with three sliders labeled Sand, Silt, and Clay set to 0.70, 0.12, and 0.10.
Soil composition computation © Chair of Being Alive, 2021.

Instead of drawing everything in a single triangle, we use triangles with different size and hatch to represent the soil composition, and define additional automated labels to map data to the drawings and interpret results from the data, so that a diagram shown in this page can be generated within a few minutes.

Three soil texture profiles for Comapregona, Emprius, and Morull, each listing clay, silt, and sand percentages with the resulting soil type, field capacity, and wilting point.
Composition of soils in Senan, Spain. © Chair of Being Alive, 2021.
Screenshot of a Rhino and Grasshopper workspace showing Python scripts and a visual programming graph that translates soil measurements (clay, silt, sand percentages) into a generated geometric pattern.
Soil composition, Grasshopper definition. © Chair of Being Alive, 2021.