Why is it important to accurately model the land features of your project site with a toposurface?
- What aspects of a building design are most affected by the terrain features?
Its important to accurately model the land features of your project site with a toposurface because you need to be able to design for specific terrain and know if you need to cut or fill the terrain to create a foundation for you building. When designing this building, the floors and first floor walls were most affected by the terrain features. My front door was also affected by the terrain and I needed to cut the terrain to allow for access to the door on level zero. This is important because in real life, most terrains will not be entirely flat, so we will need to account for this in the BIM process when designing using Revit.
When designing a project...
- Should the building adapt to the terrain?
- Or, should you adapt the terrain to the building?
When designing a project, you can both adapt the building to the terrain and the terrain to the building depending on what works best/ what is the safest to build. For example, you can cut and fill the terrain to provide a better surface to build your house on, or you can create a foundation that levels out the terrain with building materials which would be you adapting your building to the terrain.
What considerations affect a project team's decision-making when deciding the floor-to-floor height to use in a multi-story building?
- From a real estate developer's perspective?
- From a designer's perspective?
- From an engineer's perspective?
- From a builder's perspective?
- From an owner's perspective?
What are the advantages of stacking the levels of a multi-story building vertically?
- Can you share an interesting example of a building that doesn’t vertically stack (where the floor plates change their shaped radically between the floor levels)?
- What were the advantages or reasons for non-vertical stacking?
Why do stairs follow specific proportions with a set relationship between the tread length and riser height?
- How can building modeling help prevent the mistakes that often occur when designing and installing stairs?
Stairs follow specific proportion with set relationship between the tread length and riser height because of set building safety codes. The purpose of these are to create a standardized way to build stairs that reduces cases of stair incidents, Building modeling can help prevent the mistakes that often occur when designing and installing stairs by having these length and height parameters built in to their stair components already. This helps prevent errors when designing the stairs which in turn helps prevent installation errors.