Bouncin' and Behavin' Building Volumes

Quick quiz: what do these shapes all have in common?

Boxes? Well, yes boxes, and we at Buildz Internationale usually shun boxes. No, the bigger idea is that they are all boxes with about 50,000 SF of floor area. But the fun part is that they are all the same family.

So lets say I have a program calling for 50,000 sf of floor area but I have freedom to make the space a tall and skinny or short and fat (I know, I know, it doesn't usually work that way, just bear with me, sheesh!). Let's also say I'm going to nail my floor to floor heights at 10'. This means at 50,000 sf x10', I will need a volume of 500,000 cubic feet of building in which to stash my floors. 500,000 CF can look like a lot of different things. However, for a boxy building, it is basically going to be width x length x height = 500,000 CF

Back to our boxes. These are each the same loaded family, with some yanked instance parameters. Looking at the parameters of the family:

There is an instance parameter for the length and width of the box, the result of which drives the height. But the height is mediated by 2 factors. The first is that I always want my length x width x height to be the same, but I also don't want my top floor to come out at some stupid height like 3.14159'. So hInteger is an integer parameter, which means it will only return whole numbers. This is the "close enough" part of the equation. I take my total volume/(length x width) to get the optimum height to get 500,000 CF, divided by ten and rounded to the closest integer gives me the number of floors in my building. Multiplied by ten feet, this now gives the resulting height of my building.


But the fun part is dropping the family into your rvt file, giving it floor area faces, and stretching it around.




Or, glom a few together to make a 200,000 sqft development.

The principles involved for making a simple box are the same for then making something more complex, like this.





All Approx 11 million sqft. For this you have to get a little more inventive to figure out how to get the top and bottom to work together, and there is a balancing act with the pleats, but the basic ideas are all the same.


Download the files and have some stretchy volumetric fun.