Stage 1 Part 2:
The profile I created was kind of a cross with lots of in and outs. I made sure to set all the reference planes to be equidistant to the center references, and then setting all the reference planes on one side of the center plane to be equidistant to each other. I then aligned and locked the profile geometry to the various reference planes, so when I changed the width parameters, the reference planes would move with the width while staying equidistant and symmetrical (and therefore the profile geometry would also match that).
I then created 3 versions of this profile - one for the base, mid, and top profiles of the 3-point twisting mass template. I associated the width parameter of each of these profiles with the base, mid, and top width parameters of the tower family. So, when this family got loaded into the Revit project, I was able to change the following parameters:
- Profile widths: top, mid, base
- Profile depths for this geometry were just set to be equal to profile widths
- Rotation angle: top, mid, base
- Height: top
- Midpoint height was top height/2
When flexing the building forms, I made sure to keep in mind the project design brief site constraints (height, base limits, new floor area amount). After doing a couple of iterations at a smaller scale (such as with a lower building height, or less rotation), I tried to scale up and see how far the building could stretch. Finally, I kept the height constant at 750’ and base rotation at 0, then dynamically changed these parameters in Dynamo to get within the 2500000-3000000 SF gross area requirements:
- Base width (from 550-600, stepping by 50)
- Mid rotation (from -20-20, stepping by 20)
- Top rotation (from 30-90, stepping by 30)
I realized that having the mid rotation parameter go into the negative angles (going the other direction) created the most dramatic geometries, but also at times pretty infeasible designs. Furthermore, those designs tended to get a lot smaller total square footage compared to the other iterations with the same base width and top rotation, so the base and top profile widths had to be much larger to reach the square footage requirements.
I also created a custom node based off of the BuildingForm.EvaluatePairofInputs node. Instead of having 2 parameters to test and 2 outputs, my custom node has 3 inputs and 3 outputs. This created an output of 18 total iterations.
Why export to Excel?
By exporting the values to Excel, there is the benefit of doing further analysis with other values that maybe were not in the building model. Furthermore, this is a good platform to create graphs to show trends or to see which options fall along the Pareto Front. These options tend to be the ones that optimize multiple parameters while the others below this Front tend to have more trade-offs.
Results
Stage 1 Part 1:
Original building form was the twisting rounded triangular constant taper mass family.
For the instance parameters, I set the midpoint rotation to be negative the top rotation angle. The provided parameters included the top radius being 1/2 the base and the midpoint radius being 3/4 the base radius.
Results
I played around with the two parameters below to get the gross floor area within the design brief requirements.
