Edward Chen

Project Pitch: Frame A Donut!

— a structural framing tool for circular or donut-shaped buildings.

Intended users

Architects and designers who would like to design a structural framing system for a donut or circular shaped building.

Need you’re trying to provide a solution or support for

A typical structural framing system is often rectangular. This means that more flexible building forms like those with circular or donut-shaped floor plans will require a customized design for structural framing systems, which can be time-consuming. As a result, this tool aims to provide a parametric, scalable solution to the design of structural framing for circular and donut-shaped buildings.

Inputs

  • Floor height
  • Number of floors
  • Building outer radius
  • Opening in the middle (no/yes for donut-shaped building)
  • Building inner radius (=0 if answered “no” above)

Underlying logic of the model you’ll implement

  1. Create a circular or donut-shaped building form in Dynamo using the input parameters
  2. Compute the building’s floor area, surface area, and volume
  3. Create reference lines for the structural framing system (columns and beams) in Dynamo
  4. Place columns and beams in Revit using the reference lines

Outputs

  • A Revit model of the building’s structural framing system
  • Gross floor area
  • Gross surface area
  • Gross volume