B4 - Term Project - Arthur McCloskey

In my term project, I will be working with Egla Qori to create a comprehensive set of structural families for use in Revit.  In particular, we will be focusing our effort on creating families of typical components of Reinforced Concrete Building Design, including beams, columns, caissons, slabs, drop panels, and varying types of each.

The reason we selected this project was so that we may use the families we create in our Senior Design Project.  Our Senior Design Project is the structural design of a 40-story hotel in Chicago, IL, for which we have the actual architectural plan set.  It was determined in fall term that we would pursue a reinforced concrete frame structural system.  While Revit has a preexisting collection of structural families, including almost all of the above components, we hope to include the possibility of reinforcement detailing within the families, as well as including any post-tensioning that may be required.  As of right now, it appears Revit only has the ability to specify reinforcement spacing and bar size. [1]  We hope to be able to include these in the model, and just export to a schedule.

The idea of “Intelligent Buildings” has a lot to do with Revit and streamlining the modeling process.  The most challenging part of reinforced concrete design is the placement and sizing of reinforcement and post-tensioning.  Revit has been attempting to make modeling more object oriented, but still has to rely on geometric and tabulation to handle certain components.  We believe that creating these families will make the modeling process easier for our Senior Design Project, and the structural plans will be easily generated from the whole model.

The biggest challenges we will face are in the creation of the families themselves.  After the first assignment, we have some experience in creating families, but that was a very simple example, with only geometric constraints.  We plan to be able to assign structural properties and detailing within the objects themselves, which poses a challenge when considering how many permutations of reinforcement spacing and post-tensioning stress.  Also, considering how large the building we are designing is, there are likely going to be many types per family, so it is a challenge just to design that many types and making sure they are all correctly created.

Comments on Others

Andy Dinh – Your project seems similar to mine, since you are also creating families in Revit and Bentley to compare the two software.  I think it will be interesting to see which program is easier for this, and I would be interested to see if there are any advantages to using Bentley for different system families (structures, HVAC, etc.).

Kerieanne Vogler – Your project seems really interesting because I feel like the life cycle analysis of buildings is not something that we like to think of as designers.  I’m actually taking a LCA class next term and would be interested in seeing how BIM could help make that easier, because from what I remember from other classes, LCA is really difficult.

Nick Pawlikowski – This project is really interesting because it seems to combine all the major themes we are studying in this class: databases, BIM, programming.  I think the idea for programmatically generating Revit families would be such a great functionality, and I’m excited to see if it works out!

References

[1]  Wikispaces.  “Introduction to Revit Structure Families.”  Web.  Available: http://bim.wikispaces.com/file/view/Introduction+to+Revit+Structure+Families.pdf