One of the principal advantages of using masses before diving in is that you can get a good idea of your potential sqft. without having to invest too much time into it. By first manipulating masses to make shapes, which doesn’t take long, and then creating a schedule, you could get an area very quickly as opposed to creating a wonky shape line by line and then realizing it’s too big/not big enough (which would require having to change everything individually).

When is it needed/appropriate? And when not?

For example, should you create a conceptual mass model of a small house?

Not all buildings have to be modeled first using conceptual masses because a lot of the buildings we encounter day-to-day are pretty basic boxes. This includes small, generic houses, post offices, restaurants, banks, etc. However, if you want to design something exciting for a concert venue, university building, Fortune 500 skyscraper, etc it could be helpful to use conceptual masses to tinker with the exciting shape you want and quickly be able to gauge how much space you would take up.

Please post and share images of these examples to this Notion page.