Zones for Massing Model and for Space Planning

[Karoly Horvath]

Anyone out there does Stack models for quick feasibility syudies?

I am sure there are plenty.

For something like below, the last thing you need, is to draw walls and slabs and roofs etc.
All you need is Volume and Space.

Why? Because at the early stage the model needs to be simple and nimble. Something easy to modify on the fly.

In order to do that, the less elements you have, the better.
Still, you would want to be able to get information out of the model, like:

• Total Number of Apartments
• Number of 1, 2 or 3 Bed units
•  Gross Floor Area, Net (at least calculated) Floor Area
• Breakdown of areas per Use/Category
• etc

Also, sometimes you would want to do some colour-coded 3Ds right?

The Zone tool would be the logical solution to do these tasks, but:

• We can't have associative dimensions to Zones
• We can't Group Zones

WHY??????

Just because of these fall-backs, I use slabs instead. That is not very intuative, is it?

Another use case for Zones, where grouping and dimensioning would be great to have is at space planning.
I personally do not design walls to start with, I design spaces.

Walls are just drawn in once the space planning is settled. 
Like in the below sketch phase, when things are a bit all over the place, but coming together for space planning.

Again, dimensioning and Grouping zones would be an easy answer, but no, I have to use fills or slabs instead and turn them into zones later...

Yes, I understand that my design methods may be a bit unortodox, still I find it would benefit many users if Zones were not an afterthought (Annotation), but a Design Tool.

Just imagine this:

If Zones were not necessarily defined by bounding walls, but instead, the Walls were defined by the Zones, how much easier, better and more automatable the design process could be?

In the future I am thinking of a workflow where

1. we draw the spaces we need to define spaces and connections
2. set up rules like:
   • If Boundaries of Zones that are in the Apartment Zone category align (touch each other) -> add an Apartment Divider Wall Type
   • If an Apartment Zone and a Circulation zone share boundaries -> add a Corridor Wall type
   • If a Zone boundary has nothing touching it or it touches a Balcony boundary -> add an External Wall Type.
   • etc.

Befor we get to the above "Dream" stage though, we could just start with making it poissible to Group and Dimension zones!
After all - just think about it - what is the difference between elements produced by the Zone Tool and the Slab Tool? Not much, right, so why could zones not be dimensioned and grouped?

Operating system used: Windows 11