ARCH 653 Final Project - 30 St. Mary Axe

Improvements to Project 1
To begin, improvements were made to the panels and mass model from Project 1.  These improvements include:

• Making the mullions on the sub-panel family larger (from 0.5" to 3" in radius) to make them easier to see on the full model.
• Adding instance parameters to the mullion and glass materials on the sub-panel

Updated sub-panel with larger mullions

Increased visibility of mullions at project level

• Making the diagrid structure larger on the inception panel and adding instance parameters to the diagrid size and material

Updated inception panel with larger diagrid

Larger diagrid system visible at mass level from interior

• Adding type parameters to the mullion material, glass material, diagrid material, diagrid size, and the sizes of the reference circles so that all these parameters could be manipulated from the project level.

Type parameters visible at project level

New exterior rendering

New exterior rendering with glass color change done from project level

A "stripe color" parameter was also applied to two stripes of panels on the building in order to create a more accurate rendering of the actual building.  This was something that was not accomplished in the first project, but after a little more research and experimenting was applied.

Exterior rendering with stripes

Exterior rendering with stripes

Implementation of API Programming

From here, API programming was used to change some of the material parameters of the project mass from the project level using the Add-In Manager that was downloaded and installed into Revit Architecture.  Initially, the goal of using the API programming was to run a program from the project level and randomize the colors of all the panels.  For this part of the project the mass model was simplified by taking out the subpanels.  The API program was implemented by selecting all of the panel IDs from the mass level.  Then a "for loop" was run that took the "Glass Color" parameter from each panel and assigned a new, random color called "MyMaterial" to each panel.

Project with random colors assigned to panels

The API programming was then taken a step further by selecting only panels that were included in the two stripes of the building.  The part of the code that randomized the color for each panel was also taken out of the "for loop".  This ensured that each time the program was run in Revit, all of the panels in the two stripes would change to the same, random color.

Project after running API program with random colored stripes

Project after running API program with random colored stripes

Project after running API program with random colored stripes