Completing the Private Residence Project in Buffalo
Over the past week, I’ve been working hard to finish up project 17x30 the High End Residence project in Buffalo, NY. By focusing at least two hours every day, I was able to take the project from the point of final design to final graphics and complete the project! It’s been a week full of long nights and many moments of wanting to stop and take a break, but I made it through to the end and I can start focusing on my next project! Here’s how the project came together.
Developing the Final Renderings
With the design of the residence completed, the next step was to apply materials to all of the components in the Revit model. This was a simple task because I already had a material palette in mind that consisted of concrete for most of the finishes, paint, and wood finishes. In terms of the concrete materials used in this project, there’s a variety of construction types and finishes ranging from a site cast tensioned exterior façade material where the tensioning holes are visible in the concrete, a polished concrete for the geothermally heated floors inside of the house, a polished concrete for the countertops, and a smooth finished concrete for the exterior walking pads in the courtyard and the front entrance to the house.
Once the materials were applied, I setup various perspectives throughout the Revit model and adjusted each one to capture the views that conveys the design ideas of the project. Then, I adjusted all of my rendering settings and rendered each one. I’ll admit, this was probably the first project that I’ve worked on where the rendering output came out almost as good as I imagined on the first run. The view above shows the ground floor of the home with the dining room in the foreground, the kitchen in the background, and a sliver of the living room area between the two fireplaces. To see more graphics of the project, check out the Projects Page.
Developing the Section Perspectives
One of my favorite drawings for my projects is the section perspectives where I can show someone the important design elements of the project. The most important section perspective for this project was a cross section through the house and courtyard. In this view, you can see the most important elements of the house come together. First are the openings of the house that provide views towards the courtyard and the skylights that bring natural light into the various spaces. Second and most important is the submerged full basement and courtyard that provides a private and serene atmosphere for the residents.
Conclusion
Working on this project has been a fun experience because I’ve always wanted to design a single family residence. Being able to freely test some design ideas without constraints has been great to learn from, however, I also understand that some of the design decisions in this theoretical project might not be possible due to zoning and other regulations. This was a fun and exciting small scale project to work on for Journey of an Architect and I’m sure there’ll be similar projects in the future.
