Bending Balustrades

Wanting more opportunity to understand manufacturing and get out to site than architecture offices gave me, I briefly joined a fabricator of metal building components such as balustrades and window frames, with the office sitting above their factory. They were suddenly hit with a government project that mandated Revit models, yet had no competent Revit users or BIM management systems and standards in place. The rest of the team were AutoCAD drafters. As "R&D Architect", my role was intended to set up BIM standards and Rhino standards, to reform how work was done away from this manual drafting model. Despite this, the immediate needs of the business required skills in design management and detailed CAD drafting that were outside of my professional scope.

The Architectural Revit models were not contractually required to model to a level that is manufacturable, so the Revit balustrades were modelled as long chains like walls. However the reality of construction is that these had to be remodelled to a maximum length so that builders could physically carry them on site, through narrow passages and corners and up stairs. We also needed to reduce the complexity by minimizing the number of panel types. All of these were remoddelled as fully parametric Revit Family Elements. The different types of elements needed to be tracked and scheduled. This was the perfect opportunity to demonstrate how a Dynamo Python script could automate part of this process. However, Dynamo could not handle the curved elements for the spiral staircase, so I used Grasshopper to model and import these as inplace model Elements. While the automation worked, the managers cut funding on any further R&D and made myself and the intern re do everything manually!