Beginning Revit Architecture

Finally, we are learning to use Revit Architecture for the first time. I had never used it before now, but had been looking forward to it for some time. Everyone is talking about how it is the software of the future and I couldn't wait to get my hands on it! My professor Mark Clayton began teaching us the simple commands of Revit. He gave us a model that he had already created and we were to redesign the kitchen/dining/living area and somehow incorporate curves into our design whether it be a wall, floor, etc.

Below is an image of the original floor plan and to the right are two 3D images of what it used to look like.

As you can see, the area is very plain. There is only one straight wall projecting into the room to separate the kitchen area from the living area. This creates a very dull living space. We were asked to redesign the room, to make it beautiful, by incorporating curves.

Above is my revised floor plan. It was a long process but it turned out pretty well. The original plan was very dull and uneventful. The only structure in the space was the wall jutting out horizontally into the space to separate the kitchen from the living area and the way the kitchen was positioned just left the living and dining area one big space. The first step I decided to do was to move the kitchen to the right side of the room to create a sort of "walk-through" space in between the living and dining area. However, once I moved the kitchen, I realized that I was cramped for space. To give me more space, I moved the laundry room to the right side of the room beside the kitchen and adjusted the dimensions of the master bedroom, bathroom and closet to be able to fit it in there. After all of my creating and deleting walls, I was able to arrange the rooms in a pattern that was suitable and still kept the same square footage, minus a couple of square feet. This left the hot water heater and coat closets protruding into my extra space that I created. To fix it, I just simply rotated them to be positioned along the wall in between the hallway and the back door. One of my complaints of the original design was its lack of space. Not literally the lack of space, but the lack of individual spaces. I wanted to create many different spaces in the one big space we were given to work with. I started this by moving the kitchen but there was more to be done. The original plan had just one floor and one ceiling. I wanted to create spaces by splitting the levels of both the floor and the ceiling. Originally, I wanted the living area level to be at ground level, the kitchen area level to be 1'-6" higher and the dining area level to be 1'-6" lower. I successfully raised the kitchen level, however I could not figure out how to create the lower dining level (though I have somewhat of an idea how now). I figured that I could also raise the dining level, but to a lower height than the kitchen level, still keeping my three-leveled floor idea. How did I create my curves? Honestly, I just played around with curves on the floor of the room until I found something that was able to flow through the room. Once I had both floors, it seemed like they were just blobs in the middle of space, that they didn't "fit" into my space. I resolved this by continuing the curve of the kitchen floor and running it along the back wall, giving 3' of walking room along the wall. This fit the kitchen space into the room which then fit the dining space into the room because the dining area curve conforms to the kitchen area curve. I wanted to put some kind of wall to separate the kitchen from the other areas. I wanted to separate the living and dining areas from the kitchen, but didn't want to isolate the kitchen from the living and dining areas. For this reason, I created a small curved wall at the corner of the kitchen and cut a rectangle out of the middle to also help those in the kitchen communicate with those in the living and dining area an visa versa. The last step of my design process was to change the doors, windows and light fixtures inside the house. I changed the back door to an all glass double door and created my own windows using the family editor. The windows were simple. The windows are from floor to ceiling, the bottom is a rectangle and the top is an arc, very common. Then, for interior lighting, I installed recessed-can lights all along the curves in the ceiling. I took many different renderings, but these three were the best, all rendered in high quality which took about 30 minutes each to fully render.

It was really awesome working with Revit Architecture and it is just amazing how powerful of a program it is! It's no wonder why so many firms are switching to Revit Architecture. Hopefully, this is just the start of my education using Revit Architecture and I am looking forward to using it even more in the future.