Wednesday, March 23, 2011

ARCH 653 Project 1

Richard Meier's Grotta House
Kristen Stapper

Description

Modeling Richard Meier's Grotta House was relatively easy to accomplish in Revit. I began by modeling the wall layouts from the plan with all interior doors before moving to the details that really make this project interesting. In looking at a picture, it is clear that new window and door families need to be created to achieve the overall look of the style. The design is based on the number '3' and is used throughout all aspects of the project. The most obvious is his use of a 3' X 3' square for the exterior cladding. Shown below are several diagrams illustrating how families are set up.



Diagrams

The first family consists of the simplest part of the design,
the square (screenshot 1). This square is given material parameters
of white, grey, or glass. It can be used as the exterior cladding, or as a window element. It serves as a nested family in the second family shown to the left of it.

This family begins with the creation of a large window that can change in width or height. The first family square is inserted below and is arrayed. To change the number of small square windows to always be consistent with the large windows width, a formula is set to the array: Ribbon window array=Width/3'

Many different wind
ow types are created from this family setup (screenshots 3 & 4). As shown in the second screenshot image, the ribbon windows can be changed to the cladding if needed.







Screenshots from left to right : 1,2









Screenshots from left to right : 3,4




Interior Shot
In moving to the door design, I realized that my original
square family would have been more useful if I had created it under the generic template. Therefore, I was unable to nest my square family into my new door family. Overall, the families do work well in the project.

The cladding (first square family) is inserted into a wall and then arrayed to make placing the cladding less tedious.

One other imperfection to note of the second window family is that the glass is not curved as it is in the real project on the front wall. I'm not sure how to fix this within Revit except to create many individual instances within the project to create the windows. This could be done by the use of individual voids and then extrusions for each individual window and frame.

In finishing the project, I set the correct roof levels, as they were all differing heights. I created a topography relatively close (from what I could tell in slope from an image) to the existing. Additional pathways and other site features were added. Other needed materials for exterior walls, without cladding, and interior floors were painted for the finished look.