Piping and Ducting in Basements

Gore Vidal once said: "Overcrowding in the cities is producing a collective madness in which irrational violence flourishes because man needs more space in which to be than the modern city allows."

The population growth in the world poses a huge challenge for designers. Basic psychology: The smaller a space gets, the more constrained, restricted one starts to feel. There are people who love apartment living in NYC. There are people, like me, who just wants to get out of the "concrete jungle". Each to their own, I guess. However, there are certain health risks that designers need to constantly keep in mind; as highlighted in this Atlantic post.

One of the most important considerations for "high-rise living" is fire protection. This has recently been highlighted by the Grenfell Fire - My sincerest condolences to the families and loved ones involved in this tragedy. Now, the topic of high-rise living safety factors are emotive and expansive to say the least; Something which I will leave to the experts.

This Revit Recess entry will focus on Fire Protection in Revit. Often when working on sloping basement levels and the like, one will see piping below on every upper level. This is due to the view range constraints. Now we know that the View Range property is a global change - Thus affecting every area on a floor plan. However: By making use of Plan Regions, this process becomes a lot easier.

Take this as an example: We have a sloping pipe travelling from level 1 to level 2. Adding a plan region to the area where the pipe segment passes through the 2nd level and modifying the view range does not show any change. This is due to the fact that we are working with one pipe segment.

By modifying the default coupling family to become 1mm in thickness, we can split the pipes where it passes through a level (Hint: Reference Planes are great!) By splitting the pipe in two segments, the pipe will behave as we expect it should, once we adjust the plan region's view range.

On level 1, changing the plan region's view range where it should actually only show piping on level 1 as per the image below solves the problem.

Happy? I am.

Have a great weekend folks!