Journal Entry For
Module 6 - Evaluate Your Alternatives
Link to Student
- Evaluation Metric 1 - Cost per sqaure foot (Average cost)
- First, we need to know what is the floor area at each level by matching mass floor IDs and get floors areas for each floor.
- The cost per square foot is computed by dividing the total cost by total area. The total cost is calculated by summing cost on each floor following a linear relationship from 500 to 1000 dollars along the building height. The advantage of this metric is that we are now able to see how efficient the money has being spent as the top height and top rotation are flexing. With only the total cost being evaluated, we can only see that the building costs more if it has a higher height which is very obvious and we are not able to evaulate how much the top rotation will affect the cost.
- Evaluation Metric 2 - Directness to two objects
- The first step is to panelize the building surface and output a list of panels with coordinates of 4 corner points.
- The next step is to find the center points and the normals of panels we have. With them, we can now evaluate the directness between our building and two arbitrary objects we identified by taking the dot products of the normals and the vectors from our building to two objects. After that, we sum the products of and take the average of the two. We can also test multiple objects by adding same logics.
- Summary Table
- In the summary table, total 18 cases with their metrics are shown. I personally think the cost metric is the most important one and I did a conditional formatting in Excel to visualize which case has the lowest cost per square foot among all. Case 3 has the lowest cost and besides the higher the more expensive, It is also can seen that top rotation of 60 degrees cost the least under the same top height.
- Revit 3D view with 2 objects (Pyramid and Dome)
- Points to Ponder
- Do the new evaluation metrics that you’ve designed capture the meaningful differences between the building form alternatives?
- Yes, as shown in the summary table, Case 3 has the lowest cost per sqaure foot and cases with top rotation of 60 degrees are favored under the same height. In this case, I can easily choose the alternative that is the most economic. Also, in the future I might want to add one more metric that combines two metrics and give them different weights based on the owners’ favors.
- What other metrics would be useful to compute to help understand and make the case for which alternatives are truly better than others?
- In architectural aspect, the building form can be anything, however, it is also vital to consider the constructability of the building. In terms of static, it would be useful if we can evaluate how much the building surface is away from the vertical in degrees since the building would be harder to construct if it is tilted too much.
