I’ve included this one in my work samples to serve as another large-scope sample of something that I put together with a pile of PDFs, poorly organized AutoCAD plans (WAY too many broken links for drawings) and a free weekend. 

With our contract signature on the horizon, and a project with this scale – I wasn’t comfortable with leaving 22 stories of guest rooms to the last minute without a single model element developed. 

So, on a random Friday night – I dug in. Re-organized the entire CAD document set, printed revised PDFs of the existing conditions and modeled out a typical floor plate – beginning with structural. The deep concrete beams of this building help carry the 26 floors, but also are 30″+ above the finished floor at the perimeter of each floor plate. The windows sit directly on top of them, which leads to a window seat in each room, as well as a couple funky closets that have raised floors.

So, I modeled the 5th floor plate. Then I modeled demising walls and all vertical circulation, grouped bathrooms to include a the tub/shower mix and populated it with stand-in furniture for existing conditions and demo plans. 

Once that was in place, I saved that out and started on 6. There was a 2-story mechanical room that created room count variations between the 2 floors. 

Once I got to the 7th floor, the tower was a matter of copying the group to associated levels (rooms included) and voila – we have a room matrix. Nuances between floors became edits rather than full independent build-outs. The penthouse levels obviously differed, but again – it was an edit. 

I’m a ‘show your work’ guy when it comes to hotel projects. ‘Typical’ documented floor plates only cause problems in a pure BIM delivery model. It might be a cleaner way to develop a CAD set of drawings, but for me – it’s proven to be counter-productive in Revit. 

The first package of deliverables was to address the model room package. This is done to submit to Marriott that you are in fact using brand elements and detailing and set up the criteria for the rest of the building. 

The next step was to dive into Sheraton’s brand documents, which offered as much confusion as they did clarification. Cut sheets were included for items that were no longer in the room or just plain wrong. Those, of course, didn’t match the renderings or plans of the different types of rooms – but I managed to grind thru it and populate a typical King guest room with the appropriate elements, based on the room criteria developed in the request for proposal from the client. 

Now, this was already head and shoulders above the way that the firm would typically develop something like this. I wasn’t actually told that there was a team on board, and I’m not 100% certain how/why it required 4-5 people. I’d done the entire Green Bay guest room package with just me and an interior designer, but each office is different, and once the project was started. With all the families and guest rooms developed – I had another project assignment, and another batch of brand families to secretly BIM manage.