Estimated effort: 9 hours

Overview: What and Why

In this assignment you begin the project you will carry for the rest of the quarter. Using Autodesk Forma Site Design, you will establish a real geolocated site, bring in its surrounding context, generate several conceptual massing proposals, and use Forma's integrated analyses to decide which one deserves to move forward.

Your client is a developer pursuing a mixed-use mid-rise building on an infill site in the Bay Area. They want ground floor uses that activate the street, residential or workplace floors above, and a building that performs well without relying on expensive mechanical systems to fix problems the massing created.

The decisions with the largest effect on a building's performance and cost get made in the first two weeks of a project, when the least is known. Forma exists to shrink that gap, letting you test a massing idea against real sun, real wind and real neighbors in minutes. This week you are not designing a building. You are assembling the evidence that will justify one.

Focus: What You Are Producing This Week

• A geolocated Forma project with full context data
• Three conceptual massing proposals
• A complete analysis suite run across all three
• A comparison matrix and a recommendation

Design Program

• Site: a real, buildable urban parcel in the Bay Area, roughly 15,000 to 40,000 SF, with existing neighboring buildings. A site with no neighbors teaches you nothing about context.
• Building height: 4 to 8 stories above grade.
• Total gross floor area: approximately 70,000 SF, within +/- 5%.
• Ground floor: 8,000 to 12,000 SF of active use, meaning retail, cafe, lobby or community space, with its primary frontage on the most active street.
• Upper floors: residential units or workplace floors. Choose one and stay with it for the quarter.
• Floor to floor heights: assume 14 to 16 feet at the ground floor and 10 to 12 feet above.
• Parking: assume a transit oriented site with minimal or no on-site parking.
• Site coverage: leave meaningful open space at grade.

Getting Started

1.  Choose your site. Post your address to the class Slack channel before you model, to avoid duplicates. First posted, first claimed.

2.  Create the project in Forma. Define the location on the map and draw your site boundary.

3.  Order contextual data. Terrain, existing buildings, roads and property boundaries, with a radius wide enough to include anything that shades or shelters you.

4.  Read the site before you draw anything. Run sun hours and wind on the empty site. Screenshot these as your baseline.

5.  Create three proposals in the Navigator using line, basic and 3D sketch buildings. Make them genuinely different in strategy: a perimeter block, a tower and podium, a bar with a courtyard. Do not submit three variations of one idea.

6.  Run the analysis suite on each and record the numbers as you go.

How Detailed Should This Model Be?

Very rough. These massings are meant to be cheap and disposable. If a proposal takes more than an hour, you are over-investing in something you may throw away.

How This Week Affects the Others

Everything downstream inherits this decision. The massing you recommend becomes the building you develop in Week 3, detail in Week 4, document in Week 5 and coordinate in Week 9. Your glazing orientation here will determine your heating and cooling loads in Week 7.

What's Expected

1.  One Forma project, correctly geolocated, with complete contextual data.

2.  Three substantively different massing proposals, each meeting the Design Program, each with a one sentence design thesis.

4.  A comparison matrix with proposals as rows and metrics as columns. Numbers, not impressions.

5.  A recommendation naming which proposal moves forward, with the evidence that decided it.

6.  At least one place where the analysis disagreed with your instinct, described explicitly.

Scored on completeness, modeling accuracy, design accuracy and presentation quality.

What to Submit

1.  Working share link to your Forma project, view access for the teaching team.

2.  Comparison matrix, one page.

3.  Design memo of 300 to 500 words: what you read in the site, the three strategies, what the analysis said, your recommendation, and the surprise.

4.  Three massing images, one per proposal, from the same viewpoint.

Sharing Your Project

Publish your recommended proposal to your individual Forma Board and add it to the Shared Class Board. Save the project to your folder in Forma Data Management, create a project link, and post it in a new card on the Module 2 Notion gallery page. Test the link in a fresh browser window.

At Friday check in, present in three minutes: site, three options, the number that decided it. You will also give one substantive critique of a classmate's site reading.

Points to Ponder

Please also share your comments on 3 of the Points to Ponder questions listed below in a new posting on this linked Notion page: