IT’S THE HEIGHT STUPID

 

Let’s take stock:

I created a component with independent parameters: Height, Length, Width, Roof Pitch.  Then I put “length” in the driving seat, with “Scale Factors” to control Width & Height. 

 

Big mistake. “Height” needs to be the Primary Input. As soon as I assemble 4 of my generic “Naves” into a cross this becomes obvious.  Keep the Height constant and vary the length.

So far, there are 3 versions: no aisles, single aisle, double aisle. That’s a step in the right direction, but let’s try to adapt it to a real-world case.

 

 

Notre Dame for example.  I’m using Two Aisles for the Nave and Chancel, One Aisle for the Transepts.  (ignoring the chapels for now, it’s just a proof of concept)

The west end is formed of 3 cuboids, and the Apse can be created from the Nave family by editing the path from a straight line to a very small semicircle.

In 2019 when Project Notre Dame was in full flow, I did a study for my talk at Autodesk University. This analysed the massing of Notre Dame: how it is built up as a series of bays, the underlying geometry, circulation routes. That helped me to consolidate what I had learned from the process of trying to model a medieval cathedral using Revit.

This new model is similarly abstract and simplified, but also different in its approach.  I am maintaining scalable behaviour, partly inspired by the Pumpkin explorations of 2011-2013, partly as a way of facilitating a large range of models of different historical buildings, partly as an aid to modelling at city scale in Revit, (perhaps.)

 

Imagine two extremes.

·         A single family with dozens of parameters that can transform itself into almost any possible church configuration     OR

·         Tackle each church as a fresh, unique case. In which case no need for parameters at all.

Is there a sweet spot, somewhere in between? Each new church could be derived from the closest previous example. Scale it up or down using the height parameter. Then open it in family editor and make a few enhancements. Maybe swap out components, adjust some of the profiles.  Could be a rapid way of developing a lot of church models for comparative analysis.

Nave, Chancel and Transepts just scale outwards from the crossing, which is at the origin of the host family.  So how to handle towers, apses etc. that attach themselves to the periphery?

My current method is to make up parameters on the fly, then define them as Height x “a number”

Let’s see how that pans out when we try to capture a few more examples.