How much detail should you include about wall, floor and roof composition at different stages?
◦ Conceptual design
Everything can be very approximate. The goal is to get a sense of how the building would look and feel if it were built. Rough wall, floor and roof dimensions are helpful, but they don’t need to be exact, since they will change in later iterations.
â—¦ Preliminary design
Add approximate wall thicknesses, level heights and doors, and confirm the core placement. Finalize the dimensions of key elements such as the perimeter and core, and settle on major facade elements like windows and balconies.
â—¦ Design development
Assign generic materials to each component and place every element (windows, doors, balconies, etc.) in its correct position. The floor plan should work as a coherent whole, and the building’s total carbon should be calculated.
â—¦ Construction documentation
The drawings should be precise enough that someone could build the entire building from them alone. Materials move from generic to specific products, including manufacturers. Landscaping should be finalized, and any remaining questions about the floor plan or element placement should be resolved.
You moved a design from Forma into Revit this week.
◦ What survived intact, and what did you rebuild?
◦ What does that tell you about what each tool is for?
◦ Knowing where the handoff lands, what would you do differently in Forma next time?
Many manufacturers provide Revit families for their products.
â—¦ What is the advantage to the manufacturer of giving them away?
People using Revit can directly import information (ex. R-values) into their digital model. This makes calculations of variables such as carbon and heating loads very accurate for that particular material. A manufacturer with a good product will want people to model it and see how it positively impacts performance, since this can boost their sales.
â—¦ What is the benefit to you of using them over the generic library families?
This makes my model more accurate, so I have a better sense of the building's performance and carbon/energy loads. This would be very useful if I were to actually use the model for a construction project, because it would reduce the likelihood of unforeseen issues (operating costs, etc.) down the line.
â—¦ At what point does it become appropriate to switch from generic to manufacturer specific?
It becomes appropriate in the final stages of building design. Initially, the building model should be relatively rough so that the modeler can get an approximate sense of building performance and make high-level decisions. Once the modeler has a better sense of what kinds of materials they want in their building, they can choose between a few different manufacturers of those materials.
The core is located early and moved rarely.
â—¦ Why does it get fixed before most of the building?
The core needs to be fixed early because it runs through every level of the building and is extremely hard to change in later stages of modeling. It’s easy to move walls around on one level even late in the design. But if you want to move an elevator, staircase, or mechanical shaft, you need to make sure there is space for it on every level. This becomes especially difficult in buildings with many levels.
â—¦ What are the consequences of a core that does not stack vertically?
It makes for a disjointed user experience, is expensive, and raises safety issues. If a staircase doesn’t stack vertically, a person using it has to go down one flight, then search for another flight to get to the next floor down, and so on. In a fire, that would slow evacuation, which is why egress stairs must be continuous. If an elevator doesn’t stack, there would have to be several elevators across the building, each going down only a few floors. The construction company would then have to pay for multiple elevators rather than one that runs the whole height of the building. The same is true for mechanical shafts.
◦ What did locating the core force you to change about your Week 3 layout?
I had to be extra careful that the core elements went all the way up to the top floor, which is tricky given that my building has a stepped massing. I had to rearrange some of the units so that there was room for the cores in the areas of the building that went all the way to the highest floor.
Your Insight result did not match your Forma result.
◦ What accounts for the difference?
◦ Which number would you show a client, and how would you explain the gap?
◦ Does a more detailed model automatically produce a more trustworthy prediction?