Programming a Napkin Sketch

By Ken Goulding posted on Thu, 2009-07-16 17:51 , 731 reads, 2 comments

While building programming is an integral part of the architectural design process, it's seldom given a high priority until fairly late in the game. We wanted to bring programming discussions to the table even as early as the napkin sketch and created a simple tool to do so.

 

While it's certainly possible to do program take-offs in Revit by creating rooms and tagging them, this tool aims to work at a slightly higher level. Instead of assigning program to rooms, we assign it to larger areas. We divide the area using a standard size for different types in order to arrive at the number of rooms for each type. A fairly coarse, but common, methodology that is useful for broad-scale, early stage planning.

 

The tool focuses on being able to quickly block out a building sketch into program zones and allows one to instantly see the numbers in an Excel spreadsheet. This makes it a simple process to quickly achieve program targets. It's also possible to tweak the assumptions about net sizes for rooms and instantly see the updates on the plan and in the spreadsheet.

 

 

Although it has yet to be used on a real project, the hope is that this tool will give us the ability to quickly play out different programming strategies in a work-session with the client.

 

Try out the live demo

 

Notes on using the live demo:

• Select program types and drag to draw boxes on the floor plan .
• Click on the floors in the section view (lower left) to select different floor plans.
• Drag the sliders to change the net square feet per room.
• Right click a box to delete it or assign properties.
• To draw at an angle, drag one of the arrow heads of the orientation node to set the alignment (as shown below). You can also move the orientation node, by dragging the circle.