Project1

My project is to build the parametric BIM model of Casa Da Musica designed by Rem Koolhaas. His idea is to cut out several “shoeboxes”  inside a single container.

1.       Mass

 It was really hard to find a good way to define the relationship between the surfaces. Firstly I was trying to find the control points by the floor plan, but unfortunately the mass is not defined by the floor plan. Then I borrowed the book Content written by OMA which has a lot of pictures of this building and finally came up with the following idea.

Step1: Draw seven reference planes enclosed as a heptagon.

Step2:Draw reference points on these reference planes based on the pictures of Casa Da Musica

Step3:Measure the distances between the points which defined “shoe box” shaped concert hall, and add parameters to these distances so that the volume of this “shoe box” can be easily changed with the parameters. (I don’t know why I can’t add parameter to the distances between a reference point and the level1 reference plane. In addition，I can only add parameters to the reference points which on the same reference plane, otherwise it will appear constrains are not satisfied) 

Step4:In order to remove this constrain, I manually created a new one which is super clean by using the above method and deleted all the reference planes and points.Then I put new reference points on the vertexes of it,connecting them with reference lines and deleted the surfaces and rebuilt them by using the new reference lines.

step5: Add parameter to some of the points to control their coordinates.(They are no longer constraint by reference planes)In this case,I only add parameters on the z direction to avoid creasing.Now,I can change its shape dramatically !

       2.Building envelop

This envelop is not the original design by koolhaas. I did this to meet the requirement of this homework. My inspiration comes from the interior wall finish of this building.

Step1:Make a curtain panel family composed by four boxes. Two of them are transparent, others are not. Add perimeters to control their depth.

Step2:Load this family into the mass family. Subdivide one of the surfaces and load the curtain panel family to it. Then change UV values to see how it looks like.

3.       Window families:

The windows are very interesting in this project. Some of them can be easily built by curtain-system.

Some of them are on sloped walls which don’t have a orthogonal curtain grid, so I have to build specific window families. The regular window family also can’t work in this case, so I have to use generic model roof based family template. Its width and height can be controlled by parameters.

The windows on the” shoe box” are made by beautiful curved glass. I built it base on a window family template. I use the array number to control its width and height. The parameters and formulas are shown in the figures below.

             4.BIM model

Because the mass family is not a solid geometry but several surfaces, revit can not create mass floor automatically. As a result, I have to manually create the floors by tracing the interior outline of walls though it is not very accurate.

It is such a big project. I did not have all the information of it .So I just tried my best to build the interior space as much as possible. 

5.       Renderings

6.   Critics

I think revit is a good software to model constructions and their components. To some extent ,it is also a good design tool as well. But when the mass geometry is too complicated like this case, it cannot perform quite well. For example, it cannot generate mass floors based on a polyface mesh model. And it is very hard to control the geometry by adding perimeters to control points because of the limitation of the reference plane .