B4 - Team Project Smmary - Egla Qori

Using Revit's Families to Model Effectively

For our Senior Design Project, my team and I are acting as a structural engineering consultant firm, which will provide a final set of structural plans for the design and construction of a forty-story hotel located in Chicago, IL. After extensive research and factor weighing, the structural frame of the building will be designed in reinforced concrete for the majority of it, with some additional post-tensioning concrete provided for the lobby area and other spaces that are in need of longer spans.
After learning further about Revit and its abilities, Arthur McClosky and I decided to use Revit as a powerful tool to facilitate our drafting/modeling experience. One of the features of Revit we would like to explore further is the ability to create families and use them efficiently to model a large and complicated structure in a timely manner. One of the good things about a hotel structure, is the similarity between around 70% of the floors, whose layout and loading will be typical. We would like to use this opportunity to create families of typical beams, columns, floor slabs, caissons and other structural members, with their corresponding reinforcement. We would have to research a little further on Revit's capabilities of modeling a post-tensioned concrete member correctly, as we plan to use them for certain spaces or the hotel.
We expect this project to be challenging, but beneficial and rewarding. If it wasn't for this class, which specifically exposed us to families and their use, we would have probably modeled each floor separately, in a longer, more repetitive, tedious and time-consuming way.
Personally, I am very excited to learn and become proficient at Revit. Every structural engineering firm I have encountered uses Revit on a daily basis, and coming out of school with an already strong basis in Revit, is something that will definitely give us a jump start at any new job position. I decided to focus on Revit uses and capabilities, because that is a field and skillset I seem to not have mastered yet; therefore I want to use this class and this particular project as a learning experience.

Comments

Kerianne Vogler: I am not very familiar with Revit's capabilities when it comes to Energy Analysis and Life-Cycle evaluation, so I'm actually very excited to see the progression and results of your project. Utilizing Revit to walk the entire project from the design to the construction phase is important for today's designers, architects and engineers. I think this will be a very worthy investment of your time.

Drew Hovey: I could learn a lot from your project. I know there is a lot of literature out there on the difference between green and intelligent buildings, how sustainability comes into play, got to get LEED accredited, etc. However, it would be very convenient to have all this information concisely summarized in a paper and learn more on how these disciplines could be consolidated to create a "green intelligent building" as you call it.

Hayley Selden: That's such an interest aspect of building design to focus on. I didn't know Alexa was a thing until a few months ago, when my friend told his Alexa to turn the lights on and I freaked out. That was all so futuristic and movie-like to me. I think using AI to not just perform tasks around the house, but also analyze, learn and optimize the functionality of systems is very impressive. I'm excited for my future home. I agree with the idea that in order for AI to function properly, it has to have a large database and information to process and understand in order to output meaningful and useful results and functionalities. Best of luck to you; truly excited to see how your project turns out!