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/CEE 120C/220C Parametric Design & Optimization | Spring 2026
CEE 120C/220C Parametric Design & Optimization | Spring 2026
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Assignment: Flex Your Form
Assignment: Flex Your Form
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Assignment: Flex Your Form

Overview

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In this assignment, you’ll recommend a proposed design to the developers of a new high-rise building project in Dubai based on your evaluation of potential buildings forms.

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Design Brief

This project will be located in Dubai, near the Burj Khalifa in a rapidly-growing area near the Business Bay.

The project site is the open rectangular plot near the bottom of this image (to the northeast of the bay).

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Your design task is to create alternative building forms that we’ll be able to evaluate as the developer considers options for the final design. The developer’s design goals include:

Building Geometry

  • Provide between 2,500,000 and 3,000,000 SF of new floor area.
  • Stay within the site development limits:
    • Up to 300m (984 feet) wide x 100 meters (328 feet) deep in plan view
    • No taller than the site’s height limitation of 230 meters (755 feet).

Building Performance

  • Minimize the surface area of the building envelope.
  • Maximize the solar insolation potential as measured by cumulative insolation available on the building envelope surfaces throughout the year.

Economics

  • Minimize the projected construction cost – for simplicity, assume that the construction cost per square foot will grow linearly from USD $500 per square foot at ground level to USD $1000 per square foot at 750’ above the ground.
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Approach

You will be creating parametrically-driven building forms that can be easily changed by varying one or two parameters -- using both the example forms that we’ll explore in the examples as well as new forms that you’ll design.

Then, you’ll explore the impact of various combinations of the input parameters on these building forms — reporting the input parameters tested and the resulting values/metrics that can be used to evaluate these potential alternatives.

  • For building forms created using conceptual mass families, these metrics are computed automatically as the form is updated and reported as instance properties that you can read.  
  • For building forms created using Dynamo or Grasshopper, you’ll set up node logic to compute these values for each alternative tested and report the results.

You’ll summarize these inputs and resulting metrics in tables, reporting:

  • the gross floor area created
  • the gross surface area of the building envelope
  • the gross volume of the tower

For Module 5, we’ll be focusing on very simple metric based on the overall geometry of the building forms being evaluated.

In Module 6, we’ll create additional evaluations and metrics (for example, building energy performance, solar insolation potential, value of space created, and projected construction cost) to give us more powerful ways to evaluate the potential building form alternatives.

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Steps to Complete

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Stage 1: Creating Forms with Revit Conceptual Masses (for 2 or more units)

Create the node logic to test a building form modeled using Revit conceptual masses. Modeling the building form geometry as Revit Conceptual masses allows you to see the various alternatives in the Revit window as they are being evaluated, but this dependence on Revit to update the model slows down the process.

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Part 1 - Test One of the Example Conceptual Mass Forms by Flexing One Input

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Step 1 – Set Up a Building Model to be Flexed and Tested using One of Our Example Revit Conceptual Mass Forms

  • Set up the Revit building model environment
    • Create a new Revit project file using the Default template.
    • Set the Project Location to Dubai.
      • 💡
      This will be important for accurately determining the sun’s location and local climate conditions.
    • Add new levels as needed and divide your mass element into mass floors that can be used to compute the Gross Floor Area of your building.
  • Optional: If you’re familiar with the Autodesk Forma workflow for incorporating site328 context data (from one of our other building modeling courses), you can link this Revit project site file into your Revit project file and acquire the coordinates.
    • Burj Khalifa Area.rvt

    drive.google.com

  • Use the Massing & Site > Show Mass Forms and Floors command to turn on the Visibility for all mass elements, which are typically hidden in the Revit views.
  • Import a conceptual mass element into your Revit project that will represent the outer shape of your building form.
    • 💡
    You can use any of the conceptual forms that we’ve explored in the examples or located in the CEE 120C/220C Shared Library (for example, Twisting Rectangular Mass, Twisting Triangular Mass, or One WTC).
    Parametric Tower Forms - Google Drive

    drive.google.com

  • Configure the conceptual mass element to constrain any values that will remain constant in all the cases you test:
    • Adjust the instance parameters of the form to the desired values that will be held constant through your testing.
    • Set up formulas to specify any relationships between the parameters that should be maintained as the building form is flexed (for example, linking to parameters to create a constant twist or taper the form at the upper floor levels).
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Step 2 – Build the Dynamo Graph Logic to Flex One of the Form’s Input Parameters

  • Set up the Dynamo Graph logic to evaluate a single set of input values as the inputs for the instance parameters of your building form and report the requested metrics.
  • Try varying the input values manually to test a variety of alternative design scenarios, and rerun your evaluation to compute the values for the requested metrics.
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Step 3 – Report the Evaluation Metrics for At Least 6 Alternative Design Scenarios

  • After you’ve confirmed that your Dynamo Graph logic works for input values that you set manually, set up a Dynamo List.Map to iteratively evaluate a range of values for one of the input parameters.
  • Run a series of at least 6 test cases and report the input values used and the resulting metrics for each case in an easy-to-read summary table (created in Word, Excel, Google Sheets, or any data table tool) showing the input values tested and the values computed for each of the reported parameters. You can use one of Dynamo’s data exporting nodes to export the summary table directly (as shown in the examples) or create the summary table manually (by copying the results by hand).
    • If you have Microsoft Excel installed on your computer, you can use the Data.ExportExcel node to create an Excel file.
    • If you don’t have Excel installed, you can use the Data.ExportCSV node to create a text file with the result values.
    • If you’d prefer to create the table manually, just copy the results by hand to fill-in your own table. Note -- it’s much better to create the table automatically. That way, the table is always updated if you change any inputs and re-run your analysis.
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Part 2 - Create Your Own Conceptual Mass Form and Test It

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Step 4 — Create a New Conceptual Mass Form

  • Create a new Revit conceptual mass family that will represent the outer shape of your building form.
  • A good strategy is to first create profiles representing floor footprints that can be parametrically flexed, then place these profiles at several key levels and loft them into an overall building form using one of these template:
    • Template - Twisting Tower - 2 Profiles.rfa

    drive.google.com

    Template - Twisting Tower - 3 Profiles.rfa

    drive.google.com

    💡
    If you’ll be creating a Revit conceptual family that can be twisted, be sure to use the Template provided as a starting point. It’ll save lots of time!
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Step 5 - Flex and Test this New Building Form using the Logic from Part 1

  • Import your new building form into the same modeling environment used in Step 1.
  • Flex your new building form using the logic set up in Step 2.
  • Report the evaluation metrics for your new building form using the logic set up in Step 3.
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Point to Ponder: What’s the advantage of exporting the values to Excel?

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Stage 2: Creating Forms with Dynamo or Grasshopper Geometry (for 3 or more units)

Create similar logic to test a building form modeled using Dynamo or Grasshopper. Modeling the building form geometry in Dynamo or Grasshopper will allow evaluations to be completed much more quickly.

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Step 1 – Create a New Building Form of Your Own Design using Dynamo or Grasshopper

  • Create a new Dynamo or Grasshopper graph to model the outer shape of your proposed building form.
  • A good strategy is to:
    • Create profiles representing floor footprints that can be parametrically flexed.
      • 💡
      Try to come up with your own original profiles rather than using the regular polygon profiles demonstrated in the example node files. Then, save your work as a new custom node.
    • Translate these profiles to elevate them to the desired elevations.
    • Loft them to create a surface and a volume representing the overall building form.
  • Try varying the input values manually (one at a time) to confirm the your node logic is varying the building form as expected.
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Step 2 – Test Your New Building Form by Flexing Two Inputs

  • Adapt your the Dynamo or Grasshopper graph logic to automate the evaluation of two sets of values as the inputs that control the shape of your building form.
  • Set up a Dynamo List.Map or Grasshopper Anemone loop to iteratively evaluate combinations of input values for two of the input parameters.
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Step 3 - Report the Evaluation Metrics for At Least 12 Test Cases

  • Run a series of at least 12 test cases and report the input values used and the resulting metrics for each case in easy-to-read summary table (created in Word, Excel, Google Sheets, or any data table tool) showing the input values tested and the values computed for each of the reported parameters.
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Point to Ponder: Which of these inputs tested has the biggest effect on creating a desirable building form?
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Stage 3: Summarizing the Testing Results (for 4 units only)

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Step 1 - Compute Additional Metrics Based on Your Testing Results

  • Add node logic to compute an additional metric:
    • the gross floor area created / the gross surface area of the building envelope
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Step 2 - Evaluate the Test Cases

  • Find the pair of input values that gives the maximum value of this new metric
  • Find the pair of input values that gives the minimum value of this new metric
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Point to Ponder: Which of these pairs of input values gives the most desirable result? Which building form would you recommend to the developer and why?

Submit

  • Please create a folder named “Module 5” within your personal folder in our Autodesk Construction Cloud project.
  • Create a folder for each stage of the assignment that you’ve completed that includes:
    • Your Revit project (.RVT) file and Dynamo graph (.DYN) file for each stage of the assignment.
    • Or, your Grasshopper (.GH) file for each stage of the assignment.
    • The summary tables (created in Word, Excel, Google Sheets, or any data table tool) showing the input values tested and the values computed for each of the reported parameters.
      • 💡
      Be sure to include any custom nodes that your graph depends on.
  • Then, copy all of the files in this folder to your Module 5 folder on Autodesk Construction Cloud using the ACC web interface.
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    Please the following naming convention for your uploaded files: "#ofUnits_NameAndLastName_Module#_Stage#".  For example: 4units_SampleStudent_Module5_Stage1.rvt
  • Create a link to your Module 5 folder:
    • Right-click on the Module 5 folder in the file tree (at the left side of the interface) and choose Share from the pull-down menu.
    • Choose Share with Project Members, then switch to the Link tab.
    • Click the Copy button to copy the link to your clipboard.
  • Create a new posting on this Notion page — Design Journal Entry: Flex Your Form — including:
    • Screenshots of your building form geometry from each stage of the assignment that you completed:
      • For 2 or More Units: Creating Forms with Revit Conceptual Masses
        • Images/screenshots showing two variations of the input parameters for:
          • your flexing and testing one of the provided example building forms
          • your flexing and testing your new, original building form
      • For 3 or More Units: Creating Forms with Dynamo or Grasshopper Geometry
        • Images/screenshots showing two variations of the input parameters for your new building form created with Dynamo or grasshopper
      • For 4 Units: Summarizing the Testing Results
        • An image of your summary table showing the test results highlighting the maximum and minimum values found
    • A brief description of your design outlining the parameters that can be used to flex and dynamically change your building form
    • Your answers to the Points to Ponder questions for each stage of the assignment that you completed.
    • The link to your Module 5 folder in our Autodesk Construction Cloud project.