FlexiGreen Complex Building Design:
Very Early Stage Complex Building Design Tool that allows you to model and assess as many building forms as you want!
Using the tool, this is the building form that I would choose:
Overview
There are a number of other designs that can be created and selected based on the user’s priority for the outputs.
ReadMe.txt:
Use the FlexiGreen tool to explore various building designs and assess each building form according to its financial returns, sustainability factors, physical properties. Using a simple, user-friendly set of inputs, this tool will help you compare each building form based on these assessment factors so you can choose your preliminary building designs to start off with!
Steps:
1) Open up the Dynamo script and create a study.
2) In the study set-up, choose the input variables that you would like to vary by checking the box. Do note the range of values that your chosen input variables can vary in this study.
Bridge:
- Height (50-80 ft)
- Position X (30 - 60 ft)
- Position Z (0 - 50 ft)
- Top Radius (20-50 ft)
- Bottom Radius (range: 50-100 ft)
- Distance between Towers (90 - 150 ft)
- Length (20 - 100 ft)
- Width (20 - 100 ft)
- Height (80 - 160 ft)
Towers:
3) Set your goals in this study. There are 4 overall outcomes that the study will formulate for you and optimize according to your needs.
- Profit Margins
- Embodied Carbon
- Surface Area to Volume ratio
- Rentable Floor Area
4) Finally, you can set the constraints of this study based on certain constraints on the goals.
5) Once you are happy with your set-up, click ‘generate’ and the tool will study all the possible building variations and optimized outcomes! You can make use of any of the graphs to study which building form is the best for you!
6) If you are happy with it, that’s amazing! Otherwise, feel free to create another study and the tool will save all your past and current results for comparison.
Demo video
Demo Video below:
Dynamo Workflow
Marrying my work from both Module 6 & 7, here’s a look at the workflow on Dynamo to create the FlexiGreen tool!
Since the complex form of the building contains 2 towers (Cuboid) and 1 bridge (Cone), here are the input parameters to creating the geometric model. For the towers, potential input variables could be its height, width and length, while for the bridge, the potential variables could include its position relative to the x and z axis (which affects the intersection of both building parts), its height and its top/bottom radius.
Constants to determine chosen metrics/outputs
The metrics that can be used to evaluate the various building forms are:
- Profit Margins (Financial)
- Embodied Carbon (Sustainability)
- Surface Area to Volume ratio (Sustainability)
- Rentable Floor Area (Physical)
For the Financial metric, I needed to set 4 constants for the calculation of the profitability of the building - first 2 being the cost on the lowest and highest level of the building and the second 2 being the retail price on the lowest and highest level of the building. For the Sustainability metric, I used 1 constant which is the average embodied carbon in a commercial building, per floor area (sqft). The total height of the building form is determined by the tower, as the bridge can never be taller than the tower, which is set in the limits for range of values for both bridge and towers.
Combining building parts
The next step is creating the building shapes and intersecting them together using the Solid By Union node. This allows the study of the combined building parts as a whole in the generative design study section later.
There are 2 main combinations of buildings: one with just the towers, and another with both the towers and the bridge. This separation will be useful for the calculation of the revenues in determining the profit margin, as well as the rentable floor area, since the bridge will not be for rent, just the towers. The cost, SV ratio and embodied carbon will take the total combined building as input.
Adding floors to building form
To find each individual floor area, I divided the combined building into various floors, by setting the floor height as 10 ft. This is done separately for each combined building.
Evaluators for analysis
As mentioned above, there 4 evaluators that users are able to assess their buildings with using the tool.
This custom node outputs the first 2 goals: profit margin and total embodied carbon. It takes in the constants defined above, as well as the mass floor areas of the 2 combinations of building (Towers only, and Towers + Bridge).
- Profit Margins (Financial)
- The profit margins are calculated by taking the difference between retail revenue and costs, and dividing by the retail revenues.
- The ComputeCosts node works mainly by taking the given constants for costs at the lowest and highest level, as well as the total height of the building and the height between each level. Here we assume that the cost of the building increases linearly as we go up each level of the building, which is reflected in the first code block. Then, we calculate the total costs on each level by taking the product of the calculated cost at that level and the floor area of the same level. We filter null values and take the sum of that list to find the total costs of constructing that particular building form.
- The ComputeRetailValue node works the same as the ComputeCost node except it is fed the given constants for retail value at the lowest and highest level. Here the main difference is that we assume the retail price increases exponentially with the building height, since exterior views are highly desired on the top levels of the building. Hence we take the natural log of the inputs, create the series for each level and then take the exponential value of it to derive the retail value to be charged at each level.
- Embodied Carbon (Sustainability)
- The ComputeEmbodiedCarbon node uses the given embodied carbon per floor area constant and multiply it by the various floor areas and sum it up to obtain the total embodied carbon in that building form.
- Surface Area to Volume ratio (Sustainability)
- Using the Solid Volume node, and Solid Area node, I was able to find the surface area and volume of the combined building and subsequently the SV Ratio.
- Rentable Floor Area (Physical)
- Taking the output list from adding floors to the building, the floor area on each level is summed up. Take note that the floor area list of the only the towers are summed, as we are concerned with the rentable floor area which does not include that of the bridge.
Output
The output variables are then set as output which will be displayed in the results from the study.
Here is an example for one of the studies using the tool:
