Annalena Bellm - 2 Units
New Tower:
Original Tower:
The process of iterating the above towers from the original parametrically designed building to a building which minimizes surface area while still providing the desired new floor area between 1,200,000 and 1,500,000 SF while staying in the develop limits of 300’ x 450’ in plan view and 750’ in height involved using a Dynamo script. The dynamo script iterated through each possible design and then published the results into a CSV file. The dynamo script followed the following procedure:
In detail, the first step of the dynamo was to select the desired mass in the revit file that would be iterated. I decided to use a twisted tower - twisting rounded triangular mass family. Next, the user must input the desired parameter to test, the range of values to be tested, and the two outputs to record, as shown below. Though the parameter shown in the image is “Base Radius” in this example, this input can be any of the 8 parameters that can be changed in this family.
Next, the dynamo script takes these inputs and runs the custom node package provided in the Shared Google Drive folder BuildingForm.EvaluateSingleInput.dyf. This node package takes the inputs and runs each iteration in Revit and changes the parametric mass. Once changed, the node reads the revit calculated Gross Floor Area and Gross Surface Area values into dynamo and outputs them.
Lastly, these values were taken and exported into a csv file.
Once this script was set up, I had to find a way to find a way to meet the design requirements while still providing an efficient design. To do this, I chose a variable to change at each level. For the top level, I chose to iterate the height, at the mid level I iterated the mid radius, and at the base I also iterated the radius. I first ran the iteration of height and chose the most efficient height of 581 ft, then ran through the mid radii and found 110 ft to be the most efficient, and then lastly iterated the base radius and found 100 ft to be the best option. A summary of these results is shown in the figure below. Though this method is not fully wholistic and there may be a combination of results which is more efficient than I chose, this method only iterates one variable at a time and may be simpler for the end user to use the script in the future.
Through this method, I selected:
Model: twisted tower - twisting rounded triangular mass family
Top — Height: 581 ft; Rotation: 90 deg; Radius: 80 ft
Mid — Height: 200 ft; Rotation: 45 deg; Radius: 100 ft
Base —Rotation: 0 deg; Radius: 110 ft
This resulted in a Gross Floor Area of 1,212,552 sqft and a Gross Surface Area of 364,820 sqft. This design meets the gross floor area requirement while minimizing the gross surface area. Since this design meets the design requirements and is only 581 ft, the design is economical. Since the building cost increases linearly from $500 per SF at the ground level to $1000 per SF at 750’ above the ground, the cost of this building would be $252 Million. By minimizing the gross surface area, this number was minimized as well. This calculation is shown (partially) in the screenshot below.
