The intangibles of process aren’t easy to convey in a typical portfolio presentation package. This wasn’t my first foray into repetitive design elements in a building typology, and I’ve been involved with rethinking the tools for decades. In this case, with a branded hotel project – it launched a methodology that I would spend the next 4+ years trying to develop and get adopted for the firm that I was working for. 

After spending a few years fast-tracking a project’s front end development because the schematic design phase was produced in Sketchup, with out-sourced renderings done overseas, my reaction was to push-back on the dead-end workflow. It isn’t at all fluid, and it isn’t the fault of the software. 

Hospitality projects are a game of inches, and any one bust in dimensions can have a down-stream impact on the entire project. A constraint that makes a patron bang their knee moving around the room taints the guest experience – which has an impact on the marketability of the hotel itself.

This stuff is important. If its important – it should be drawn & modeled properly. BIM is an amazing tool, that was falling well short of its potential. 

Everything in the brand spec was developed, and composed as Revit families with shared components or groups for maximum repeatability and dexterity for design revisions. All of which can then be exported for collection & reuse on the next project. I wasn’t just building a Revit model – I was building a database.