Estimated effort: 12 hours

Overview: What and Why

This week your project changes tools and changes character. You will send your Forma proposal into Revit and rebuild it as a real building: walls with layers and thermal properties, floors and roofs with actual assemblies, doors and windows with types, and a core with a stair and an elevator that a person could actually use to escape a fire.

Up to now your model described shape. From here it describes construction. A Forma massing knows it is a wall. A Revit wall knows it is cladding over an air gap over an insulated stud cavity over gypsum board, and it can tell you its R-value. That difference is what makes Weeks 6 through 9 possible, because a structural engineer, a mechanical engineer and a coordinator all need to interrogate assemblies, not surfaces.

You will also set up the project environment properly. This is unglamorous and it causes the most pain later if done casually. A model with the wrong project north produces wrong solar analysis for the rest of the quarter.

Focus: What You Are Adding This Week

• Correct project environment: levels, location, orientation, units, cloud model
• Exterior wall assemblies with real layers and thermal properties
• Doors, windows, and curtain wall at the primary entry bay
• Floor and roof assemblies, with a terrace or a green roof
• Shading on one elevation
• Core: one fully modelled egress stair, a second simplified, an elevator, a service shaft
• One Insight energy use run

Design Program

• Levels matching your Week 3 floor to floor heights, named consistently, for every floor plus roof.
• Exterior wall assemblies with real layers, minimum R-19 in the opaque wall. Use two exterior wall types, a typical upper floor wall and a different assembly at the ground floor.
• Roof assembly at minimum R-30, plus either a terrace or a green roof, not both.
• Floor assemblies distinguishing structural slab from finished floor.
• Glazing with defined thermal and visible light properties. Target U-factor at or below 0.35 and a solar heat gain coefficient appropriate to orientation. Your south and west elevations should not use the same glazing as your north unless you can defend it.
• Curtain wall at the primary entry bay only, with door and window panels where the entry occurs. You do not need curtain wall across the full ground floor frontage.
• Shading features on one elevation, a simple overhang or fin array, sized from your Week 2 sun hours analysis.
• Core and circulation:

◦  One egress stair fully modelled with correct tread and riser proportions.

◦  A second egress stair placed remotely and modelled simply, as a shaft with a placeholder run.

◦  At least one elevator.

◦  A mechanical or service shaft running vertically through all levels.

• Simplified rules for this project:

◦  All doors at least 32 inches clear width.

◦  Maximum travel distance to an exit of 250 feet, assuming the building is sprinklered.

Important: these are simplified starting assumptions to keep your design moving, not a substitute for a real code analysis. What matters is that you can locate a requirement, apply it, and check your model against it.

Construction Planning and Methods

Assume a concrete podium at the ground floor with a Type III wood frame or light gauge steel structure above, the most common construction type for mixed-use mid-rise buildings of this size and budget in California. You are not modeling structure this week, that is Week 6, but the construction type should inform your choices.

• Wood frame over a podium generally caps out around five stories over one or two levels of concrete. If your Week 3 massing is eight stories, revisit either the height or the assumed structure, and say which you chose.
• Wall thickness follows from stud depth. A 2x6 exterior stud wall with continuous exterior insulation behaves differently, and occupies different space, than a concrete wall at the podium.
• The podium transfers loads from the frame above, which is why the core wants to stack and why misaligned walls get expensive.

You will not model individual studs or rafters. You will make choices about composition by selecting and editing Types, and those choices should be defensible.

Getting Started

1.  Install the Revit add-in for Forma and confirm it loads.

THIS STEP WILL CHANGE — FOR REVIT 2027, NOW EXPORT TO REVIT FROM BUILDING DESIGN. REVIT ADD-IN NOT AVAILABLE (OR NEEDED) FOR REVIT 2027

2.  Send your proposal to Revit. Massing, floor plates and facade arrive as native geolocated Revit geometry.

4.  Save to the cloud. Create a Revit Cloud Model in your Forma Data Management folder. Do not work locally.

5.  Refine the envelope: walls, then doors and windows, then the entry curtain wall, then floors, then roofs. Create new Types rather than overriding instances.

6.  Add shading to your chosen elevation.

7.  Build the core. Shafts and floor openings first, then the primary stair, then the simplified second stair, then the elevator.

8.  Check travel distance to the nearest exit from the most remote point on a typical floor.

9.  Run one Insight energy use analysis and compare against your Week 3 Forma numbers.

10.  Use the AI Assistant for Revit where it helps, particularly for swapping families.

How Detailed Should This Model Be?

Accurate about assemblies, approximate about everything else. Your wall, floor and roof types need real layers and real thermal properties because Weeks 6 and 7 depend on them. Your second stair does not need every riser modelled. Resist the urge to detail what nobody downstream will interrogate.

How This System Affects the Others

Your assemblies determine the heating and cooling loads a mechanical engineer inherits in Week 7. Your core becomes structurally load bearing in Week 6 and carries every riser and duct shaft in Weeks 7 and 8. Your floor to floor height minus your structural depth is the plenum everyone else has to share.

What's Expected

1.  A Revit cloud model, correctly geolocated and oriented, with a complete and correctly named level structure.

2.  A complete building envelope: walls, doors, windows, entry curtain wall, floors and roofs, all with defined assemblies and thermal properties.

3.  Two distinct exterior wall types, and either a terrace or a green roof.

4.  Shading on one elevation, with a stated relationship to your sun hours analysis.

5.  A core with one fully modelled stair, one simplified stair, an elevator and a service shaft, vertically consistent.

6.  One Insight energy use result, compared against your Week 3 Forma estimate, with a short note on why they differ.

7.  A six sheet set: ground floor plan, typical floor plan, roof plan, two exterior elevations, one wall section showing your assembly layers.

What to Submit

1.  Working link to your Revit cloud model in Forma Data Management.

2.  PDF sheet set at D size, 36 by 24 inches, six sheets. Delete any blank sheets.

3.  Screenshot of your Insight result alongside your Week 3 Forma result.

4.  Design memo of 300 to 400 words: what survived the handoff, what you rebuilt, what assembly choices you made and why, and where Revit and Forma disagreed.

Sharing Your Project

Upload to your folder in Forma Data Management, create a project link, and post it with your sheet set on the Module 4 Notion gallery page. Test the link in a fresh browser window.

At Friday check in, show your wall section and explain every layer in it.

Points to Ponder

Please choose 3 of the 5 Points to Ponder questions and share your comments on this linked Notion page.