The second half of ARCH 406 this summer will focus on contemporary architectural practice and design. We will become adept at Building Information Modeling, parametric form-making, digital fabrication and documentation. Our work will produce a portfolio of exciting manifestations of architectural theory.
Every day, you should post a sketch and a screen capture to the picasaweb site. You can look at classmates work and make comments too.
As a vehicle for learning BIM concepts, model the Langford Architecture Center Building A. The first step is to create reference planes and a massing model:https://picasaweb.google.com/114818401354993545049/BIMMassingJuly22012?authuser=0&authkey=Gv1sRgCKSCl8uU3pbmkwE&feat=directlink
The next step is to create walls, curtain walls, roofs, floors, and rooms from the mass model. These can be composed onto sheets:
The final step is to produce the documentation of the building using sheets and views. The concept in Revit is that the floor plans, elevations and sections are simply views of the BIM. Schedules are merely another kind of view that lists elements and their attributes or parameters. Each view can be specified by what entities are included and how they are portrayed. Entities may be "Model" entities that represent the building itself, or "Annotation" entities that are merely drafting conventions, such as dimension lines, tet, and tags. Each graphic view has a "Visibility/Graphics" edit button. You can use the resulting dialog box to make settings that turn on and off categories of entities, change their color, change the hatch pattern for the category, set "poche" parameters, and otherwise determine the characteristics of the image. Each view also has a scale, a level of detail, a wireframe/shaded/realistic setting, shadow casting values, and cropping settings. An experienced Revit user creates many views of the building. I usually create one "Working" view of each floor and change its visibility parameters to help me edit. Then all of the other views have set view parameters that determine how the model looks on the sheets.
Sheets are composed by positioning views (including schedules) on the virtual sheet. The views are rendered at whatever scale, crop settings, and visibility settings that were established for the view. Printing is best done directly from Revit to either the plotters or a PDF file. You print the sheet at full size to preserve the correct scale of the drawings.
https://picasaweb.google.com/114818401354993545049/July62012BIMSpaceModel?authuser=0&feat=directlink
We could do more. The main doors, the stairs, the railings all need to be added. I really should walk you through doing a structure model. You can place beams, columns, and create beam systems. Revit has concrete precast beams and even double tee beams in its standard library, We could do more site work, such as the retaining walls in the moat and the planting, the parking, the driveways and the sidewalks. We still need to go over cameras and rendering, as well as scope boxes, clipping planes, and many other toosl for controlling the image.
But next week we need to do parametric modeling and formula-based design.
Research a detail used to create a complex curved form. Consult Detail magazine to find something that interests you. Create a digital model and a physical model. Use parametric modeling to create a complex shape out of many small shapes.
The physical model may combine the 3D printer and the laser cutter or CNC cutter.
Examples include:
Deliver:
Revit templates an examples are distributed on Dropbox.
An introduction to parametric models is shown at
Here is an additional exercise on using Reference Planes and constraints to build a Revit model of a Louisiana Plantation house.
https://picasaweb.google.com/11481840135
There are many blogs about using Revit for complex modeling. Here are some:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1T_NOtdvPo Jim Cowan is a friend.
http://buildz.blogspot.com/2010/12/parametric-design-patterns.html Zach Kron is perhaps among the most influential with his blog.
http://autodesk-revit.blogspot.com/ David Light is a BIM Manager in the UK.
http://revitclinic.typepad.com/
http://texasarchitecture.blogspot.com/ I started my own blog, but have not been very diligent about it. I should put up some of these recent exercises.