My Second Revit Project - Part 4

It's been a while since I posted about the latest project that I've been working on for a while now. Below are some images from last week. There's still work to be done (the weather has NOT helped) but hopefully it will be finished by the end of the year. The last major work consists of demolishing some existing parts during Thanksgiving and then the staff and students will move into the new parts of the building.

It is pretty enlightening to follow a job in construction. Regardless of how many drawings you crank out and how carefully detailed something is, you're still at the mercy of how someone interprets notes/markings on a submittal (or whatever mood they woke up in that day!). Sometimes it feels like there's not enough leadership at the subcontractor level and no amount of hand-holding from the contractor side (superintendent and PM) or the Architect is enough. But I'm finding that by maintaining a collaborative spirit, being nice, understanding and firm, you can take care of the Project and help steer it in the right direction.

We're currently helping our client by creating Evacuation maps for occupied spaces. Revit comes in really handy for this task. Here's a snapshot of one such map (the screen color is off, but the printed output is correct!):

Here are some tips about the tools and techniques used:

1. An Annotation family was created to manage the graphic border layout, title and legend (title block).
2. A floor plan view was created and the appropriate categories were left visible. Everything was set to halftone with the exception of rooms.
3. A color scheme was applied (for Area, By Range set to be at least 1SF). This made all rooms show solid with the orange color we wanted.
4. A Filled Region was applied around the building to make it pop more.
5. The exit paths were drafted in the sheet view after setting two unique line styles.
6. Multiple plans were created by Duplicating as Dependent and placed on sheets (with no View Title). Room fills were controlled by overriding visibility in each view. The Reveal Hidden Elements tool made it easy to un-hide one room at a time for each plan view and hide other irrelevant rooms.
7. An empty sheet was kept handy in the Project Browser with nothing but a title block. To create a new sheet, I simply selected the sheet in the Project Browser and used the copy & paste keystrokes to duplicate the sheet (thanks Luigi for reminding me of this tip!).
8. The Project Browser was filtered to display only these views and sheets, making it easier to work on this particular task.
9. When one area of the building was complete, I used a recently added feature to position a new area on a sheet: Pan Active View by activating the view, selecting the crop region, right-clicking on it and selecting Pan Active View. This is similar to just moving the crop region around, but I found panning the view within the crop to be more user-friendly for this task. This function is only available for views placed on sheets.
10. I'm up to 55 sheets created with about 12 to go, but interestingly enough, the file only gained about 1MB in size!

My Second Revit Project - Part 4

My Second Revit Project - Part 3

This High School Addition & Renovation project is moving fast and part of the building will be open in a couple of months. Here are some more images.

My Second Revit Project - Part 3

My Second Revit Project - Part 2

It's been a while since I posted some images of my second Revit project (I say mine, but of course there were plenty of others working on this project and there still are!).

These few images show progress made over the months since my last post all the way through April. In the coming weeks I'll have more images which will reveal further progress. At the moment it's still hard to see what the building will look like, but in May and June a lot of finish trades will get going and things will start coming together rather quickly. Currently, new metal panel is being installed to re-clad some of the existing metal panel and I'm very anxious to see how it looks. The superintendent sounded very excited about it today...that's always good news! Click on the image below to scroll through the photos or click Auto-Play.



Of course design doesn't stop just before construction starts. We did some re-designing of the library reception and a few other things (the new librarian worked differently and wished to have some adjustments). With Revit, we were able to make the necessary modifications, present a few schemes and document the changes. Below are some shaded views of the library interior and reception area.

My Second Revit Project - Part 2

My Second Revit Project - Part 1

So today I decided to start a series of posts about the second Revit project that I was involved in from Design all the way into Construction, which is the phase we’re currently in. The steel is almost all erected and stud framing and roof carpentry (wood blocking) is in progress. That is, when it’s not raining!

This is a challenging project and I can’t wait to see the end result. But first some history: the original school building was designed by renowned firm CRS in the 1950s. The almost sixty year old campus has seen numerous additions and renovations over the years and it was time to give the “old lady” a nice, well deserved face lift. The main issues that we were asked to address were security, campus expansion and renovation and the installation of a new heating and cooling system to service the new addition and most of the existing buildings. The original campus was typical regional architecture: wide overhangs with very low roofs and narrow, “finger” plan buildings with open breezeways.

Back in those days, there was no air conditioning, and natural ventilation was the only means of cooling. Well, this is the Houston area we’re talking about. I don’t honestly know how they lived without A/C!

Adding insulation and using high performance, high impact glazing was key and the final solution had to “fit”. The goal was to make this “new” facility look like it was all built at the same time, and believe me….it was and still is a huge challenge! We wanted to keep as much of the original buildings and structures as possible for budgetary reasons and also to respect the original CRS buildings. You can see the existing structure in red in the pictures below with new structure nestled into it:

The only available space for expansion was the area between the existing “finger” buildings. We had to give up the “courtyards” to bridge this area with a new building, which is higher so that it could accommodate clerestory windows to bring in natural light, to house mechanical mezzanines and to tie in with the slope of the existing roofs. We re-used many of the existing sloping fascia details to tie the new with the old.

This was the first project where I had to learn all there is to know about Phasing in Revit. We pushed the boundaries and learned a lot. We started by modeling the existing building and structures that we were going to tie into. This helped us visualize those complex situations where new structure was to be nestled into the existing. It also helped us see what our massing options were based on seeing exactly which parts of the existing structures we could demolish. And all this while designing the new addition and taking construction decisions at the same time.

The hardest challenge in Revit was to figure out how to demolish parts of elements, such as roofs, beams and walls. I will discuss some of these techniques in future posts and will continue to write about the progress of this and other projects.

My Second Revit Project - Part 1