This assignment is based on the work from Module 5. The Revit mass is parametric tower - twisting rounded triangular mass (figure 1). Its parametric properties are shown in figure 2 and same as Module 5, I decided to change its top height and base radius and keep the others constant. However, since this module includes solar analysis, the sun path was added and its settings are shown in figure 3.
For this assignment, three new evaluation metrics were added including construction cost, solar insolation, and HVAC size. The new evaluation results were combined with the basic building information from Module 5 and exported to excel for review (figure 4). The parametric inputs for building and inputs for evaluations were shown in figure 6 and figure 7.
To estimate the construction cost, I used the assumption that the construction cost per SF will grow linearly from $700 per SF at the ground level to $1500 per SF at 750’ above the ground. As node blocks shown in figure 7, I calculated the cost per SF for each floor according to its elevation and times it with the corresponding floor area. The cost for each floor was then saved as a list. Then, I used the removeNulls function to remove the null numbers in the cost list and use the sum function to output the total construction cost for the building.
To estimate the solar insolation, I used the weather information and non-ground surfaces as inputs for solar analysis and output the cumulative and average solar insolation as evaluation results. The used surfaces were defined in another custom node by selecting those that have a normal vector with a z component larger than -1 (figure 10).
Since cooling and heating load is important for high-rise buildings, I created a new custom node to estimate the HVAC size based on the assumption that one ton of HVAC cooling capacity can cool down 500 square feet of floor area. Similar to estimate the cost, I used the area of each floor divided by 500 as the estimated number of tons of HVAC needed and take the summation of the result for each floor as the total output.
To generate several design alternatives, I assigned two ranges to parametric inputs so that the top height will be changed from 600 feet to 750 feet with an increment of 50 and the base radius will be changed from 140 degrees to 150 degrees with an increment of 10. In this way, by paring up those two parameters with a custom node, I ended up having 8 different design scenarios. I set up my dynamo script in a way that it will report the input values used and the resulting metrics for each case as a table in Excel (figure 12). The table shows the input values tested and the values computed for each of the reported parameters. What is more, after having all the tested results, since we have a requirement for gloss floor area that needs to be within 1,200,000 and 1,500,000 sf, I added additional scripts to filter all the design scenarios and display ones that satisfy the requirement (figure 13).
