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- The Grasshopper script I have created allows to do different things which I am going to detail in the following sections.
Create the building
The base shape is a circle that I am moving and reseizing depending on the shape I want to create. One the radius of the exterior circle is chosen, the radius of the interior circle is obtaind by multiplying the original radius by a number between 0.001 and 0.9.
Following the same logic, the top exterior radius is obtained by moving the base circle up by the chosen height of the building.
The roof is created by lofting a surface between three circles that are obtained by receizing and moving once again our base circle.
The facades are created by lofting the interior circles and the exterior circles speratly as shown with the two following images.
Once we have the facades, we panalize them and create the frames as i’ve done in numbers of my previous assignments. The frame’s radius depends on the size of the largest panel. The color of the frames also depends if the user choses to have the environmental option in which case the frames will be wood. Other wise, frames will be created with steel.
I have also added elevators in the building. The user can choose the number of elevators there is going to be in the building.
The original form is an extrusion of a rectangle. Once we have the original form, we create a serie of positions that are regularly spaced in the strutcure. They are placed at a distance from the center which is the average between the exterior and the interior radius. All the positions are calculated taking the number of elevators and dividing 360 degrees evenly and placing the elevators every (360/number_elevators) degrees. So here we have 5 elevators placed every 72 degrees.
The inside court comes as an option with the environmental package. If the user wants it, it takes 95% of the interior base radius and creates a green space with 100 trees randomly placed.
The foundations are created the same way as the three. We take the surface area of the ground floor and populate it with piles that are basically cylinders.
The number of piles is proportional to the surface area of the ground floor. Their depth and radius are proportional to the height of the building.
Outputs calculation
Once we have all these elements for the building, we are able to get some outputs. The outputs I have chosen to focus on are the price of the building, its gross floor area, its carbon footprint and the number of trees necessary to balance the carbon emissions due to construction.
- Price of the building:
I assumed concrete for the slabs and piles for the foundation, glass for the facade and wood or steel for the frames on the facade. Once I get the mass or volume for each of the material, I multiply it by a unit price. I also added the price for the elevators. The sum used depends if the environmental option was chosen or not.
- Gross floor area:
I calculte the floor area by adding all the floors and calculating each of their area
- Carbon footprint:
Very similar to the price of the building just changing the price by the unit CO2 emissions for each material. The only difference is taking into account the carbon reduction thanks to the greenspace assuming a 50 year lifespan and a 16 year payback time. The other numbers come from various websites (https://www.purple-roof.com/post/green-roof-co2-capture-explained, https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/10/7/2256/pdf#:~:text=The amount of CO2 emitted,-2·yr-1.)
- Number of trees:
Assuming a 50 year lifespan and that each tree absord 50kg of CO2 per year, I also give the number of trees the client would have to plant to absorb all the CO2 emited by the construction of its headquarters.
User’s inputs
These are all the inputs the user is going to have to put it in order to get the building created and the outputs calculated.
Each one of the inputs has a range of possible values that are explicited on the prompt for the user not to mess it up.
All the inputs are pretty explicit. “Simulation done” is a toggle that allows the user to play around the preview of the building until he’s ready to close it. That is when he has to enter true. The “Simulation number” is useful for the data collection.
Data collection
Once the user has entered the values for the inputs and got his building and his outputs, all of those are stored in an excel sheet. The sheetname is going to be the Simulation number. That allows the user to do several simulations to test different inputs and keep all the data stored. So after he is done with the first simulation, he can just launch the simulator again but this time using the number 2 for “Simulation number” which will create a new sheet in the excel named “2”.
Documentation
The “BYOB” (Build Your Own Building) tool was developped to allow companies to quickly design a campus and get as outputs the design of the building, its gross floor area, the cost for building it, the carbon footprint for the construction phase and the number of trees to plant to balance this carbons footprint over the lifetime of the building (here 50 years).
