PORTO DOORS

 

I visited Porto in 2016 for a conference. This was about half way through an 8 year period of attending as many Revit/BIM events as I could, often as a speaker.

I was already moving towards small group events and meet-ups with a broader range of people involved in construction when the pandemic called a full stop.  Moving forward I hope to continue this trend and especially to visit new cities around the globe to think about “The Way We Build”

For sure I will be photographing doors, and pondering the different responses to climate, culture, security, and symbolism.

 

I recently posted four of these Porto doors on LinkedIn, suggesting that it would be interesting to build Revit families that capture their essential form.  When building a BIM model, we always have to think about the appropriate Level of Detail for the intended purpose.  We will always be simplifying and abstracting to some extent.  Hinges and locking mechanism are probably best captured by a specification code rather than attempting to duplicate screw threads in 3d.

I do have a modular system for assembling door families.  This aims to minimize effort and maximise reusable content.  Once I have created a style of door panel, it should be available to all current and future doors families with a minimum of effort, whether they are single or double, hinged, sliding, folding … whatever.

So I set about building these four doors, using an appropriate starter family from my collection.  I already have proven approaches to fanlights, double doors, curved heads etc.  These are fully parametric and interchangeable.

The system is based on nested components with a standardized naming of the nested elements and of the parameters used to vary proportions, materials etc. 

 

Attempting these four doors was a useful test for my system, which performed well for the most part.  Taking a panel with 4 vertical divisions and duplicating it to create one with 5 is straightforward enough.  I do have components that emulate traditional mouldings and raided/fielded panels.  The downside is that this increases the levels of nesting.  You have to make a judgement call.  Do you want to just refer to typical details, or do you need to use these families for close-up renderings?

In this case I am just using flat extrusions for both glazed and solid panels.  But the fanlights and security bars needed to be addressed, even if in simplified form.  My rule of thumb is that you can recognize the various door types in a project at a glance.  Anyone who knows the project will tend to fill in some of the details subconsciously, but only if there are no obvious discrepancies.

So the security bars on the blue door are incomplete (missing from the fanlight and highly simplified in the door panels)  And the fascinating design of the red fanlight doesn’t perform too well if you change the proportions to radically.  It’s quite challenging to make a design of this complexity parametric, but I enjoyed having a go.

I could spend more time on these four examples, but I have a feeling that tackling some doors from other city visits will prove more compelling, when I pick this up again.

For that matter, there are plenty of variations from my Porto visit to test other aspects of my system.  Folding doors, elliptical and pointed heads, for example. 

From past experience, waiting until I am deeply enmeshed in modeling a historic building to develop a new type of door is likely to result in a rushed family which breaks under pressure.  After all, I may only need one specific size for the task in hand so really robust parametric behaviour may be lower priority than progressing the main building model.

So exercises like this one can be useful to expand my system and make it more adaptable, especially to deal with traditional designs and older buildings.