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Building visuals
- your original building form
This is one of the options I simulated including the sun exposition. The parameters for this building are the following:
- Base radius: 100
- Number of segments in the base: 7
- Height: 750
- the recommended building form based on my evaluation and analysis
The parameters for my recommended building are the following:
- Base radius: 200
- Number of segments in the base: 3
- Height: 450
I used the same nodes as in module 4 to have an adptative panel which opening would depend on the sun’s direction. The input for panelizing the system is the loft surface obtained with the chosen parameters.
I only changed the way of creating the sun path now that we had Ladbug.
This node allows to get the vector from any sun position. Once we have it, we can evaluate the directness of the sun to any panel. This directness then defines the opening and the color of all the panels.
I also added a node to make the frames grey to make it appear more like a real building.
New evaluators nodes
Construction cost, Real Estate rent, time to be profitable:
- The construction cost and real estate rent are very similar. It is basically multiply the surface area by a certain price.
- Construction cost: I used the linear relation between constrution price of a square feet and height of the building.
- Real Estate rent: I assumed $14/SF/month for area with window access and $8/SF/month for area without window access.
- The time to be profitable in obtained in months by deviding the construction cost by the Real Estate rent.
Direct sun exposition:
Before starting to calculate the sun exposition, I had to flip some of the surfaces because their normal were poiting downward. I also excluded the top surface since it won’t be a living space.
I used boolean masks to get which normals were pointing the right way and which ones didn’t. Then flipped the ones that had to be flipped and merged everything to send it into the solar analysis.
The first steps are only defining the sun path, the location of the project, the grid size, the number of sun positions we want. I wanted to do all the sun positions at midday for 365 days but it would make grasshopper crash so i restrained it to 3 positions.
The last part of this node is to calculate which points are exposed more than half of the time to the sun. Using once again a boolean mask, I got the length of the list containing only points respecting my criteria and divided that by the total number of points.
Optimization logic
- The three parameters I chose to base my building’s optimization on are the construction cost, the time for the building to become profitable (depending on the rents) and the percentage of floor area exposed half of the time to the sun.
- I took all the values and remapped them to a 0 to 1 range in order to be able to weigth all of them and combine them into one unic optimization value.
- I combined these parameters with the following weighted values:
- 0.5 for the time to become profitable: This is the most important one because this is going to be decisive for investers to choose if they are going to invest in that construction project or not
- 0.2 for the construction cost: Once the building is highly profitable, this is less important. The first investment might be important but as long as the return on investment is quick, it is not as critical.
- 0.3 for the percentage of floor area exposed half of the time to the sun: This is very important because that will impact the building’s energy consumption.
- The result is a single value between 0 and 1 that allows me to see which are the best design options.
The way i defined my inputs are so that the floor area would be about the same for each building option so that i would be more able to compare them especially when considering the construction cost and real estate rent.
The three optimal solutions are the one in color going from the best (in green) to the third best (in orange).
We can see that remapping the numbers between 0 and 1 makes that the relative difference between the remapped numbers can be huge but very small for the original numbers.