How much detail should you include about wall, floor and roof composition at different stages?
◦ Conceptual design: Show mass, height, and the idea. Walls, floors, and roofs appear as plain surfaces or one generic type. This is a really simple stage, so being able to easily adjust to see environmental impacts for different concepts is essential
◦ Preliminary design: Use typed assemblies with approximate thickness and a target R-value, such as “wood stud wall, R-20.” Nobody sizes layers yet, but more specificity is important as the project moves along.
◦ Design development: Define every layer by material and thickness, with thermal properties, structure, and more. Engineers and the energy model depend on these and using different materials or thicknesses can easily change R-values for example.
◦ Construction documentation: Specify exact products, fastener and flashing details, joints, and tolerances. The contractor builds from these drawings and the description quality is directly related to the end product.
You moved a design from Forma into Revit this week.
◦ What survived intact, and what did you rebuild? The massing, level heights, and window and balcony pattern survived. The walls arrived disconnected and broken, and no rooms registered correctly, so I rebuilt the envelope in Revit with layered wall, floor, and roof types and placed the rooms again. I also changed my massing a tiny bit and reloaded into Revit to fix intrinsic gaps that seemed to be unfixable after the initial transition.
◦ What does that tell you about what each tool is for? Forma tests massing, sun, daylight, and carbon and other environmental analyses quickly. Revit holds construction, with layers that join at corners and close around rooms, requiring much more detail that can easily break if mishandled.
◦ Knowing where the handoff lands, what would you do differently in Forma next time? I had tried to stack different line buildings and they weren’t joining properly. I had to switch to one building with individually edited floors. I would’ve taken this approach first if i knew if was going to break in revit. I would also draw walls as closed loops, finish the core and unit boundaries before export, and test one floor in Revit early instead of the whole building.
Many manufacturers provide Revit families for their products.
◦ What is the advantage to the manufacturer of giving them away? Designers who put a product in their model are more likely to specify it, and the family keeps the product in the project through to purchase. This improves the likelihood of their products making it in the final construction detail and being used in the future as well.
◦ What is the benefit to you of using them over the generic library families? The dimensions, performance data, and clearances come from the real product, so the model matches what gets built. Generic families are only placeholders and don’t mirror what is built in the real world.
◦ At what point does it become appropriate to switch from generic to manufacturer specific? Switch in design development, once the product choice is firm and engineers need real data. Real data can only come from real products, so switching to manufacturer specific can provide a better model and understanding of the product as it moved into design development and especially construction. Use generic families in conceptual and preliminary design, because the product may still change, and there is no point in being overly specific if it doesn’t matter to anyone and will be adjusted in the future.
The core is located early and moved rarely.
◦ Why does it get fixed before most of the building?
◦ What are the consequences of a core that does not stack vertically?
◦ What did locating the core force you to change about your Week 3 layout?
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?