Frame a Donut

Overview

This is a tool to help architects, designers, and engineers quickly generate a structural frame for a circular or donut-shaped building they envisioned. I found that most structural framing systems, and the design tools thereof, assumed a rectangular form. However, a rectangular building form can be limiting for non-rectangular designs like a circular or donut-shaped building. These non-traditional building forms are becoming more common, as in the case of Apple Park in California, GCHQ building in Manchestor, the Darling Exchange in Sydney, and the Gherkin Tower in London. Although these buildings look vastly different, their framing system can be envisioned in a similar way. Therefore, I build upon the Dynamo logic of my Module 7 project (”Apple Park Analysis”) and create a tool to help quickly generate and test different round and ring-shaped building forms. I hope this tool will be a helpful aid to daring, creative architects and designers.

Dynamo Script

The script can be found in the Autodesk Construction Cloud folder linked above. An image of the logic is shown below.

Teaser Images

The tool has great flexibility in generating different circular building forms that can be adapted to a stadium, a corporate headquarter, a tower, an exhibition center, etc. For each design, the user will also get the building’s gross floor area, surface area, and volume as outputs.

Video Demo

Link:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wkDv8n-Y2_JmHuk8XtlRZ6whzbs6SWFT/view?usp=sharing

(Unfortunately, the video went over 2 mins! Despite I tried to keep it as short as possible, the tool has a lot to offer.)