Module 5 - Flex your form

Overview

For this project, I created a tower composed of three main tubes. Each tube rotates around the tower’s centre axis to create this torsion effect. The tubes all have different lengths, which gives the tower some depth and interesting geometry. The user can adjust and flex the tower height, its torsion, the tube thickness at three points, as well as the length offset between each tube end.

Figure 1: Parametric tower, personal design

Results

Part 1 - Flexing an existing shape/form

The following section shows the results I obtained for this assignment. Table 1 displays the building performance for the rounded triangle tower design (Part 1 of the assignment) when the tower height and top radius are flexed.

Table 1: Building performances for the rounded triangle design

From this analysis, we can see that we achieved our desired floor square footage for a tower ranging from 450ft to 600ft tall as shown in the highlighted green cells.

Ideally, we would like to minimise our project cost. First, we estimated the construction cost per square foot of floor area. This cost “will grow linearly from $500 per SF at the ground level to $1000 per SF at 750’ above the ground”. Then we could compute the overall construction cost from the estimated gross floor area.

Our results indicated that a 450-ft tall tower with a 130-ft top radius seems like the most economically sound option with an estimated construction cost of $987M. On the other hand, a 600-ft tall tower with a 110-ft top radius would cost close to $1.40B

Part 2 - Flexing an alternative design

Table 2 below shows the building performances for my own tower design (Part 2 of the assignment) when the tower height and middle section thickness are flexed.

Table 2: Building performances for my alternative “three tubes” design

Following the same procedure described in the previous part, our results indicated that a 650-ft tall tower with a 45-ft middle section base length seems like the most economically sound option with an estimated construction cost of $1.17B. On the other hand, a 700-ft tall tower with a 50-ft middle section base length would cost up to $1.42B

Modelling approach

The following steps describe my modelling approach for this assignment.

Part 1 - Flexing an already existing shape/form

For this part of the project, we used an existing design from the CEE 220C folder. We then flexed this form to our liking, and gather some expansive results in order to complete our thorough building analysis.

Part 2 - Flexing an alternative design: custom three-tube tower

For this part of the project, we used created our own design in Dynamo, as shown in figure 1 in the Overview section. We then flexed this form to our liking, and gather some expansive results in order to complete our building analysis.

Special thanks to Nico for trying to help me fix my code out :) <3