Creating Forms with Revit Conceptual Masses
Part 1
The design is modeled after One World Trade Center, a building close to my high school and place of work. To develop this, I created a custom node that takes as input the selected Revit structure, the input parameter name (height), range of height values, and parameter output names (floor area, surface area, and volume). The results of these three outputs are mapped for each height value used as input to the function. The resulting list is then exported to an Excel spreadsheet that also takes the file path, Excel sheet tab name, and row/column from which to overwrite data.
All six runs comply with the total floor area range requirement (2.5-3M sf), site development limits (984 ft wide x 328 feet deep), and height limitation (755 feet).
Parameters that can be flexed to dynamically change the building form are:
- Range of height values and increments (number of runs)
- While the base width/depth can be revised to change the structural form, these updates are completed in Revit rather than Dynamo per Stage 1 assignment instructions, which is not entirely parametric.
Point to Ponder: The advantage of being able to export output values to Excel is that values can simply be updated in Dynamo (height, etc.) and Revit (base width/depth), which are then automatically output in a readable table format in Excel.
Part 2
The new conceptual mass form is a twisted structure roughly based off of the 3-profile twisting tower template provided. The shape, radius, and rotation at each of the three levels was revised to convey a twisted art form. This new building form was imported into the same modeling environment as used in Part 1, and was flexed using the same logic as in Step 1. Evaluation metrics are reported in the table below.
All six runs comply with the total floor area range requirement (2.5-3M sf), site development limits (984 ft wide x 328 feet deep), and height limitation (755 feet).
Similarly to Part 1, the parameters that can be flexed to dynamically change the building form are:
- Range of height values and increments (number of runs)
- While the rotation and radius per level can be revised to change the structural form, these updates are completed in Revit rather than Dynamo per Stage 1 assignment instructions, which is not entirely parametric.