The Smith House Post Two Grid Lines

 “The power of the grid is to lift the designer outside of the protective capriciousness of the "self" by providing an existing set of possibilities, a set of rules.”
Ellen Lupton

   Hello again, and welcome to Part Two of Richard Meier’s Smith House. As you can guess from title and the quote above we are going to be discussing Grid Lines in this post.  Grids Lines are used in a variety of ways in Revit, and are a great tool for controlling the geometry of your projects. A couple of ways that you can use Grid Lines in a project: 1) You can create a structural layout for columns, which the columns snap to at the intersections of the Grids. 2) You can create a grid for place light fixtures on a ceiling plan.

In this project, we need to lay out a grid over the image so that we can lay out the four columns for the public side of the house. I went ahead and placed the Grid Lines in the view so that I could spend some time getting into greater detail about Grid Lines and how to control their placement, and their styles options.  

The Smith House First Post

My first project is the Smith House, which sits on a 1.5 acre site in Darien, Connecticut. The house sits on a rocky outcrop that overlooks Long Island Sound. Meier was just 31 when he was commissioned to design a weekend retreat for Carole and Fred I. Smith, and their two little boys. Meier used the house to investigate the spatial separation of public vs. private. The private side of the house looks solid in plan and is constructed out of wooden bearing walls and a framing system. The public space is at the rear of the house, and overlooks the water. The public side is supported by columns system, which allows for a huge curtain wall that allows for the space to be what Meier calls a "180-degree explosion" of light and space.   

The Outside of the building embrace elements that would become Meier signatures: white exterior, expanses of plate glass framed by well proportioned piers and mullions. The facades of the house allow one to easily read the spaces behind it. The private side facade faces the street and is an opaque screen that is only intermediately pierced with windows. The entrance into the building is where Meier becomes playful by piercing the second story of the private side by a ramp and allowing for dramatic view of the sea and the sky that are framed and intensified by the transparent skin of the rear facade.

          In this first video post of the Smith House,  I’m going to insert an image of the first floor, scaling it to the correct scale, and pinning the image so it won’t move when placing geometry.

               

         

Here we go

Hello to all,

Being that this is my first post I would take a guess that I am the only reading this. A quick introduction and then away we go. I love the Architecture of Richard Meier. I think he is America’s greatest living architect, and maybe when the dust settles the greatest in our history( Sorry to all the Wright and Gehry fans out there). So obviously I studied him throughout Architecture school and I quickly became frustrated with the lack of 3d modeling of his buildings in Google Warehouse or on the internet. At the same time I also discovered the awesomeness of Revit and started using it in my design studios. So obvious I thought combining the two would make a great blog. In doing this blog I wanted to accomplish two things, so here is my mission statement

Why do this?

Well in my case practice makes perfect, and in every Revit project there is something totally unique to that project. So by doing is best way to become as proficient as possible.

What I hope to get from this blog? 

I hope to learn something new with ever post, not only by doing, but from the experience of others. So I hope to learn just as much from comments.

So with that said the first project that I am going to build in Revit is the Smith House.