The transformative power of BIM.
The biggest advantage for me was how quickly I could compare different design options. Comparing two facade schemes using drawings alone would have taken much longer. In Forma, I was able to run sun-hour, daylight, and carbon studies on both options using the same settings and get results the same evening. That gave me something more objective to base the facade decision on.
The same thing happened with the unit mix. Once I assigned unit types, Forma automatically counted them, and the area information helped me catch problems. For example, two corner units that I had originally considered one-bedroom units were actually closer to studio size based on their area.
At the same time, very small design changes were sometimes more difficult than expected. I needed a door connecting to the podium only on levels 2 and 3, but because the typical floor plan was being used from levels 2 through 8, I had to split the floor plans just to make that one change. Simple things like flipping a stair or changing a door swing, which would take only a few seconds in a drawing, could be awkward or sometimes not possible in the model.
Your building is a set of decisions, most made before you knew enough.
The decision I feel most confident about is choosing Option B, the horizontal window bands. When I compared the two facade options with the same balconies, Option B reached 68% sDA while the punched-window option reached 62%. Carbon and sun-hour results were basically the same, so daylight was really the only result that clearly separated the two. Even after I added more balconies to meet the program requirement, Option B still stayed slightly ahead at 63% sDA.
The decision I would probably revisit is the 99 ft depth of the tower. I decided on that dimension in Week 2 mainly to meet the overall area target, before I had really tested the residential units. Once I started laying out units in Week 3, the problem became much more obvious. Some units became long and narrow, the average unit size ended up around 835 SF, and about a quarter of the floor area was below 150 lux. If I did it again, I would probably test a typical unit depth, maybe around 30 to 35 ft, before locking in the massing.
You produced roughly thirty deliverables across ten weeks.
Every model in this course was a simplification.
One major limitation was that the model did not really know what the windows looked like when it calculated carbon. Forma's carbon tool only used one overall WWR value, so the punched-window facade and the horizontal-band facade both came out at 30 kgCO2e/ft² even though they looked very different. It also did not really account for the balcony area, and the lifespan was set to one year by default until I changed it. Another example was the wall between the tower and podium. The automation initially treated it like an exterior wall and placed windows there, even though that wall is actually covered by the podium.
There are also many things that simply do not exist in the model yet, including the structural system, ductwork, and the parking ramp. I think those simplifications are acceptable when the goal is to compare early design options. They become a problem later, once the design has to go through an actual energy-code review, such as California Title 24, or move toward permitting. At that point, the actual window layout, shading devices, wall assemblies, structure, and building systems would all need to be modeled much more accurately.