PULL THAT LEVER

This weekend I was continuing my preparations for RTC Auckland, revisiting the work I did on Lever House quite a long time ago.  My presentation aims to make comparisons between Lever House, Casa del Fascio & the Gherkin.  In the process I hope to demonstrate the value of a BIM approach to the research & teaching of architectural subjects (history, technology, design theory etc etc)

By coincidence I received a request a few days ago from Vincent, (a French student) asking me to share my files for Lever House.  They are doing a project of some kind.

So I've decided to upload some work-in-progress files for whoever is interested, but especially for young students of architecture & other construction disciplines who may want to gain a deeper understanding of some of the key moments in our history than can be gained from the usual slide lecture approach that we experienced in our university days.

The images are snapshots from these files and represent the state of play as of last night. 

A word of warning here.  It's all a bit rough at the edges.  Need another weekend at least to have this model ready for Auckland.  Also I am working from incomplete data and one brief site visit a few years ago.  I have had to make many assumptions and some judicious simplifications.  The aim here is to understand principles and generate useful ideas, not to create a dusty museum specimen of some arbitrary moment of frozen time.

I firmly believe that BIM software opens up the possibility of an exchange of ideas and information about our built past. far beyond anything currently available.  Think google earth/street view, but with the ability to walk inside listed buildings and access analytical diagrams, learn about the people involved, see exploded diagrams of construction details.

I have uploaded 2 pdf files with several sheets each, & two 3d dwf files.  One of the whole building and the other a deconstructed portion of the external skin.  The work is incomplete, but I hope it will be useful.  You can find the files  HERE  Lever House

CURVE THAT SCREEN

Thanks to Dave Baldacchino for pointing out my blind spot.  (see comments on previous post)  My take on the Voysey style stair screen is much more easily achieved using a curtain wall & edit wall profile.

Which got me to thinking if there were any advantages to the adaptive component approach.  What if you wanted to curve the screen.  Not possible to edit profile on a curved wall.

But of course you could make an in-place mass & do a "curtain system by face".  But now we are approaching a situation where it's almost as much effort as making an adaptive family.  And once you have made the family it's easy to play with different parameter values.  Design by flexing ... appropriate if you have a vague concept and want to explore the possibilities.

Once I got started on "S" curves I couldn't resist setting up an alternating pattern.  Now we are entering territory where curtain walls struggle.  I'm not going to do a step-by-step on this.  It's an extension of the principles from the previous post, but with a bit of "host by intersection" thrown into the mix.

The possibilities are pretty much endless.  Not sure what the application would be, starting to feel more like Calatrava than Voysey now.  Also looks like some kind of drunken bar code.

It's difficult to grasp the geometry fully based on single frames.  It could be a screen or a ceiling baffle in an up-market food court perhaps.  I've seen crazier forms.  The excitement would be in the changing patterns as you walk past. 

Using a different colour and size for the two repeaters makes it easier to understand, which is why I did that.  Then I realised that alternating mullion types would be another justification for  the adaptive approach, even on a straight screen.  You could do it with a curtain wall, but it starts to get messy, especially if you want to go through several design iterations.

I'm going to finish up with a little GIF to simulate the effect of movement. And thanks again to Dave for making me think harder about what I am doing and why I might want to do it in a certain way.

 

PRIMAL SCREEN

This week Matthew, an intern in our office who has been using Revit for some time, came up with an interesting query.  He wanted to make a slatted timber screen that acts as a guarding to an open staircase.  He had made a rectangular version based on a parametric array & a sloping version based on fixed geometry.  But how to make a parametric sloping version ?  This is what he wanted to achieve.

I ad-libbed my way to a solution based on adaptive components in about 20 minutes as a live demo sitting down at his computer.  Basically it went like this.  "New Family" choose "Generic Model Adaptive".  Place 2 points and make them adaptive.

Select the points and hit "spline through points". Turn this line into a reference line (check box under properties)  Place 2 more points, hosted on the line. one close to each end.  We will move them right to the ends later, but for the moment don't want to get them confused with the adaptive points.

Now create a new mass family.  Go into the plan view & draw a rectangle.  Add parameters for X & Y dimensions.  This will act as a profile within the massing environment.  Load it into your adaptive family & place and instance on the reference plane of one of the points.

Do the same for the other point.  Now you have 2 profiles hosted on a reference line.  Select these and hit "create form".  You end up with a rectangular slat that will adapt its length to whatever is constraining the two ends (ie whatever the two adaptive points are connected to)

All good.  But in case you had a problem with the alignment of your profiles, don't forget about the Work Plane Viewer.

Once everything looks OK you can move the points to the very ends of the reference line.  Just select each in turn and check out their properties.  Under "normalised curve parameter" you will see a value between 0 & 1.  Adjust these to be exactly 0 & 1 respectively.  The crazy parameter name really means "position along the line"  (don't worry about it, it does make sense once you get to understand the full possibilities)

Create another new family.  Could be "generic model adaptive" or "conceptual mass"  (I think)  Set up dimensioned ref planes as shown.  I did this in a front elevation view.  Place 4 reference points and lock them in both directions to the planes.  (Use the align command & close the padlocks that appear)

Just check that everything works.  Type in new values for each parameter & watch the points respond.  If they don't follow the ref planes, try locking them again.  Now you can use "spline through points" again to create a horizintal ref line & a sloping ref line.  We're almost there.

Select the lines & choose "divide path".  You'll get 6 nodes.  Do this for both lines.  At this stage each line has become 2 things at once: the original ref line AND a divided path.  You can use the tab key to toggle between these two personalities.  The divided path has a "number of nodes" property.  You can hit the little secret button at the end of the line to link this to a parameter.  I created one called "no of slats" because I'm going to load my 2 point adaptive family and attach it to these nodes.

When you select this slat, a little "repeat" button will appear on the ribbon.  Hit this and it will populate the repeaters.  That's it.  We have an adaptive family with 3 dimension parameters to control the shape, and a "no of slats" parameter to control ... the no of slats.

Try different values to check that everything works.  This is called "flexing" the family.

And my final image shows the parameters that are available.  I already mentioned the ones in the host family, but you also have 2 dimensions and a material in the slat family.  (I forgot to mention creating the material parameter ... you just select the form and hit the little secret button at the far end of the material field under properties)  Hope someone finds this useful. 

You can download a copy of the family from here:   SCREEN.RFA