The custom node above calculates the real estate value of the building. This is done by multiplying the floor area on each floor by the price per square foot. The price per square foot starts at $450 per square foot on the bottom floor and scales up to $1200 a square foot on the top floor.
This property is located near a water feature. This custom node calculates the directness of view to that water feature. The center of the water feature is defined as a point and the overall score for each panel is calculated and the values are summed up. This custom node was built using many custom nodes from the class website. It does not produce outputs as expected despite using the nodes given by the teaching team. I attended office hours to try and resolve this issue and was told that my logic was correct and the issue was most likely with the custom node given by the teaching team.
The values given below are what were produced after working on this assignment for over 10 hours and attempting to troubleshoot with Steffi in office hours as well.
Points to Ponder: The metrics that I evaluated do capture a meaningful difference between the building form alternatives. For example, as the building depth increases the real estate value increase and then decreases again showing that the optimal values is most likely around 250 feet. Similarly, for the building width, the value decreased and then increased showing a local minimum in real estate value around 700 ft. For the directness of view, no value was produced so it can not be seen how the metric changed with the changes of the building. It would be assumed that as the width increased the view score would increase and as the depth increase the view score would decrease. Some other metrics that might be valuable in evaluating the building requirements include doing a solar study to understand how light effects the building or how the building surrounding the site shade the structure. Another useful metric would be to see many many units of a certain size can fit inside the floor plan of the proposed structure.