Part 1: Provided Building Form

This part utilizes the “Twisting Simple Triangle Mass” Revit family created for the class. I am able to manually edit the building height, and I made a Dynamo script to iterate through various angles of rotation at the mid-height.

The user confirms which mass element they want to update (I’ve selected the Twisting Simple Triangle Mass and massed by floor in Revit). I defined a range from 0deg to 90deg at 10deg increments to evaluate how those changes influence the building’s gross floor area and gross surface area.

Each defined angle of rotation is run through the script and the geometry is updated in Revit. The custom node developed in class, BuildingForm.EvaluateSingleInput, is used to evaluate one varying input parameter. The cases are run and results exported to Excel. In Excel, I manually added the table headers to clarify which results correspond to which input parameters. It should be noted that some of the resulting combinations exceed the required new gross floor area. These combinations should be excluded from consideration because they will result in an unnecessarily high construction cost.

To visualize the results, the following pictures are provided that illustrate no rotation, 40deg of rotation, and the full range of 90deg of rotation at the mid plane.

Reference the file included below for the tabulated results for this building analysis.

Part 2: New, Original Building Form

I created this shape to investigate the curved forms of parametric structures. By mixing concave and convex curves, I was able to create unique building shapes. The total structure height and the structure’s mid-height are the two parameters that can be used to flex and dynamically change the building’s form.

The user confirms which mass element they want to update (I’ve selected the conceptual family I created and massed by floor in Revit). The tower height ranges iterate through six potential heights representing a different number of floors. I made the floor-to-floor spacing at 18ft on the upper levels, so I defined the range to increase at 18ft increments. Similarly, the structure’s mid-height (defined “Podium Height” in the family) is evaluated for different heights between 200ft and 450ft at 50ft increments. The combinations of these inputs has a significant influence on the resulting floor area and surface area of the structure.

The process to iterate through the input values and report the results is very similar to the process described above in Part 1. The difference here is that multiple combinations must be created and run for every possible combination. This is achieved by using the Cartesian Product node, resulting in 72 different potential combinations of total height and mid-height. The custom node developed in class, BuildingForm.EvaluatePairsOfInputs, is used to evaluate two varying input parameters. The cases are run and results exported to Excel. In Excel, I manually edited the table headers and data layout to clarify which results correspond to which input parameters. It should be noted that some of the resulting combinations exceed the required new gross floor area. These combinations should be excluded from consideration because they will result in an unnecessarily high construction cost.

To visualize the results, the following pictures are provided. Both combinations meet the building geometry requirements, but have slightly different final characteristics that will result in different economic and building performance which will be assessed in following Modules.

Reference the file included below for the tabulated results for this building analysis.