How much detail should you include about wall, floor and roof composition at different stages?
◦ Conceptual design: just location and size.
◦ Preliminary design: Exact dimensions, rough material idea like “wood construction”
◦ Design development: All layers and components of wall design including membranes, interior and exterior finishes, insulations, and structural components. Each of these should have specified materials and thicknesses.
◦ Construction documentation: Exact specs for each material, detail drawings and notes on installation.
You moved a design from Forma into Revit this week.
The building and floor plan dimensions, location data, and facade designs all survived the transfer well. The stairs did not transfer well and had to be rebuilt. Also, none of the general construction choices we made in Forma (wood-construction) transferred over. Forma is for general massing and initial design and layouts. Revit is for the details like how many steps are between each floor, and what is the exact composition of each layer of the walls and roofs and how do they connect. Next time, I wouldn’t spend as much time on the carbon analysis in Forma, because the Revit one is a lot more accurate.
Many manufacturers provide Revit families for their products.
Using manufacturer’s Revit families allow for very accurate analysis results for tests like Carbon Insights. These specific families should be used when deciding between which manufacturers to use for the project’s materials in the design development and construction documentation phases. If the manufacturer’s product has high energy efficiency performance, they would want to provide those families so their potential customers can see the benefits of their product.Â