Trevor Scandalios, Revit Blog

 
 
                The Glass House is a home designed by the architect Philip Johnson. It is unique in the way that except for the bathroom, it has no opaque walls, only glass curtain walls.

                Working on this project has caused me to become very impressed by the ability of Revit to stream line the post-conceptual part of the design process. The ability to take drawings on paper and transform them into a three dimensional representation of the building composed of the actual components that it would consist of if it was constructed is a powerful tool.
Photos of the Actual Building:
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Drawings of The Glass House Created in Revit:
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Plan
 

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Section A107
 

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North Elevation
 

Renderings of The Glass House created in Revit:
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                The architecture 424 class has been a great resource in learning to use Revit. The lessons that we learned about modifying element instances and types to create custom objects were very helpful in the undertaking of this project. One reason this was important was due to unique doors that reach from the floor to the ceiling. Another place that this was crucial was in creating the custom floor and ceiling slabs.

                The intuitive interface and informative help menus have also been a great resource. For example, one aspect of the building that I was unsure about how to model was the glass doors in the curtain walls. By using the help menu, I was able to discover that this was accomplished by selecting one of the panels of the curtain wall and changing that part of the glass into a non-curtain wall. It soon became apparent, however, that since I created my curtain wall without using a preset curtain grid, my curtain wall was not divided into selectable panels. However, thanks to additional use of the help menu and the intuitive interface, I was able to discover that I could use the openings tool to remove the area of the curtain wall I needed gone, place a non-curtain wall in that void, and then place the custom door.

                One interesting aspect of designing this building was having to discover how the building was actually put together. This was because the building is not constructed using the conventional residential method of using supporting walls. In the end it was apparent that the building's columns are standard wide flange columns and that it has 4 wide flange beams along the exterior edges. This in turn supports a reinforced concrete ceiling slab, which all rests on a brick floor slab, which then rests atop an additional concrete foundation slab. 


                This photo of one of the corner columns alongside the same view in the Revit model illustrates the way the exposed columns and window mullions meet.

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One aspect of Revit that I would like to become more knowledgeable about in the future is rendering. Although I am pleased with how the renderings came out, some aspects could have been more true to the actual building. For example, the steel of the actual Glass House is painted black, while the steel in the Revit model is not.





Corrina Hall
4/23/2010 03:46:29 pm

Nice discussion of how you have experimented with the different aspects of the Revit software. It is remarkable how close the rendering from Revit is to the actual photos. Its ability to portray shadows really helps make it more realistic. It would be interesting to compare it to a 3D model done from AutoCAD. Keep up the discovery and the blog!

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5/22/2010 10:52:31 am

You did a super job here! Very impressive. For such as small building, all those column details matter. If you look at the top beam, there are some vertical blocks (4 on the long side, 2 on the short side). Since it is such as simple structure, these matter.

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2/13/2011 01:36:45 pm

Thank you very much for the information I really appreciate it!!

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2/17/2011 08:58:29 am

You gave great points here. I found nearly all people agree with your blog.

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2/22/2011 10:06:30 am

Such a nice post.waiting for more.

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3/6/2011 10:01:54 am

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3/7/2011 01:18:38 pm

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3/19/2011 12:31:05 am

Pretty cool post and very inspirational. I agree with most of what you say above. Thanks for share it keep it up.

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SpareParts
3/29/2011 12:27:31 pm

You did and amazing job there. im currently also taking a course on Revit and the more im using it the easier and better is gets, i have not gotten to rendering part.(still in roofs and floors). Also i was wondering if you could provide a link to the Section A107 and North Elevation for larger pics, Im working on a research on Philip johnson and your drawings are the only ones so far that i found that are not of the Floor Plan.

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4/12/2011 06:32:33 pm

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4/13/2011 07:39:01 pm

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4/21/2011 04:06:35 pm

I tried to think so, but I found it was not as the same in the actual process. As you mentioned, I still have doubts, but really thank you for sharing!

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5/4/2012 12:10:32 pm

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Annabel
9/13/2012 11:28:28 am

I am currently studying this building at university in Australia and my task is to recreate it in Revit, like what you have done. I am brand new to Revit and we (classmates and I) have actually been encouraged to contact people in regards to getting a floor plan for our projects. If possible, this presentation looks amazing and I would love to ask if you still have these files and wouldn't mind sharing them.
Best Regards...

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10/9/2012 06:16:48 pm

Really is to let people unexpectedly, give me too much surprise, I said I am very lucky..

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Jordie
10/24/2013 11:44:59 am

Just wondering how you did the glass walls? curtain walls?

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