Recommended Building Form:
Based on the excel sheet outputted from dynamo, this design seems to be the best. This is because the code created a score for each design based on the rental cost/revenue, embodied carbon, and space efficiency. It has the highest score out of all of the variations in the design. The parameters I chose to flex; “top height” and “Bottom Side A”, with the ranges for each selected only provided four options for a design. The top three are highlighted in green. The ones that are not within the surface area range provided in the assignment are red.
Original Form:
When I was trying to decide what to evaluate the building by, I instantly thought of cost. So in some way the metric of cost is important. I thought it would be difficult to figure out the cost of the building, but the model already calculates the gross floor area in sqft, so I though about rent! That is an important metric to consider when building something, how much money can possibly be made from the asset? Someone in the session also brought up embodied carbon. I really like that idea, because that is a metric I had to look at in another course for a building we designed. I assumed that the entire building was made of reinforced concrete and used the average embodied carbon coefficient for reinforced concrete.
Honestly, I could not get mass floor function to work, so I created custom nodes that took into consideration one of the three values the model already calculated (gross floor area, surface area, and volume).
Rental Cost Custom Node:
In this node I used the maximum floors (75) and from the CEE 248 course I know that rents for higher levels are usually more expensive than lower levels. Due to that I split the building into two parts; top levels (25 floors) and bottom levels (50 floors). I estimated an average price per sqft for each of the two. Based on that the node calculates the average rental cost/revenue in each variation.
Embodied Carbon Custom Node:
I thought this node was fairly simple to create. I used gross volume, a metric my original model already calculated. I found the conversion from ft^3 of concrete to kilograms of concrete online. Using that value I multiplied by the embodied carbon coefficient.
Single Optimization Node:
I weighted rental costs as the most important, because usually investors do things based on how much money they can make. I used my personal preference and ranked embodied carbon second, because I care about the carbon footprint. I then ranked space efficiency the least important in terms of scaling. The optimization node created a scaling factor for each parameter and then created and overall score for each variation of the design.
For the four unit portion I panelized the ideal design and changed the colors based on the sun! here it is!
