Designing a villa and garden with a BIM software: Park House

Designing a villa with exterior spaces with an architectural BIM design software. Let’s find out more about the Park House project, with a detailed analysis of its main interventions.

Probably one of the best ways to get to grips with the use of any software is to start off with examining the included example files. In the case of an architectural BIM design software, an excellent practicing method is to reproduce a previuosly developed architectural project using its project documents, (floor plan, elevation views, cross-sections, etc.) and try duplicating the architectural and structural model.

This turns out to be very useful in order to understand how and why a project’s designers make certain choices and to highlight which solutions are proposed to their clients. Moreover, it helps the user to learn many of the tricks that relate to use of the software as well. Opting for a complex, but at the same time inspiring project, can in fact turn such practice into something enjoyable.

This is the case of Park House, a 1,250 sq ft detached house built on a 1,700 sq ft land plot and located in Madrid (Spain), designed by the architectural design firm, A-cero. One of their Projects was remodeled by using the architectural BIM design software Edificius.

Park House, the project

Park House is characterized by the presence of overhung volumes with a stone and large black stained glass lining. These volumes give the house facade some motion, thus transmitting a distinctive sense of architectural dynamism that we can also find in other projects developed by the A-cero team.

Architectural organization of the Park House spaces

The Park Housing project is developed along three floors:

• The basement hosts an indoor pool, a gym, a garage and other service rooms. The presence of some terracings, integrated in the vegetation, allows to get natural lighting. Moreover, the tree-lined promenade leading to the garage entrance hangs softly from the street and gives a touch of natural beauty to the whole park.

• At ground floor we have the living area. Its entrance is characterized by a large double-height room. The spaces’ brightness and simplicity enhance the beauty of a wonderful spiral staircase with glass railings. Next to the living room, characterized by the same double height, an office, a dining room, a kitchen and some toilets are accomodated. Through a large window you can get to the porch, which leads to the park and the outdoor pool. The large entrance door of the house has a unique design and is made of the same distinctive materials of the house, ie black glass and steel.

• The first floor is devoted to the sleeping area, with five bedrooms and their related bathrooms. Each bedroom is arranged so as to receive natural light through the sliding windows that overlook the garden.
  

  First floor

  The house’s finishes show a high quality standard, such as the wood and stone floors, or the lacquer paint of the walls. In the whole house the style is minimalist and gives a touch of elegance and simplicity.

Designing Park House with Edificius

To reproduce the Park House Project with the Edificius BIM software, we started off from importing the project’s plan views. Quite an easy operation with Edificius because various CAD file formats (for example ‘.dwg’ or ‘.dxf’) can be imported and used to trace the BIM objects on.
After inserting items such as horizontal envelopes, columns, slabs, etc., we proceeded with placing the fixtures, which, like any other 3d object, can be edited according to our needs or stylistic preferences.

All the objects and the materials used to design this villa are included in the , thus they can be used to make any object as close as possible to reality.
While remodeling the various spaces and objects, an interesting aspect was designing the spiral staircase of the Edificius BIM Objects Library  house’s ground floor.

Modelling staircases

 

By adopting the architectural element staircase we were able, thanks to its editor, to give it a spiral shape. On the other hand, by adopting the wall element we managed to insert the railings.

Modelling the pool

To design the outdoor pool the pool element was inserted into the ground.

This automatically calculates the cut in the terrain according to its relevant placement. The bottom, at variable levels, was obtained by using and modelling the staircase with landing and ramp architectural objects.

Modelling terraced elements

Another interesting solution, ingeniously addressed thanks to the BIM software Edificius, was how the terraces were designed. These were supposed to give an external view and bring in some extra light to the undergorund floors.

Thanks to the ground movements in the terrain environment we managed to assign the desired elevation to each riser.  For the terracing to be fully integrated in the surrounding context, trees and bushes were inserted by means of the vegetation tool. After completing the Project, the high definition textures were applied.

We also applied some customizable filters in order to get even more attractive photo realistic rendering.

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