Steel nodes, from coordination to documentation
One source for the steel nodes, reused across coordination, analysis and documentation.
The problem
On a tall, complex tower, the steel nodes were a problem before anyone could detail them. Nobody could picture what they looked like or how much room they would take, so coordinating them against services like electrical and plumbing was guesswork. And there was a second problem waiting behind the first. Even once the nodes were resolved, no one was sure how to get geometry that complex into Revit for documentation, or into the analysis model, without modelling each one by hand for every stage.
What I built
I wrote a script that pulled in the project information, the grids, the architect’s sketches, the Revit floors, and generated what we called node massings: shapes that showed exactly how much space each connection needed. Peppered through the building, they gave the team something concrete to coordinate with.
Once positions were locked in through coordination, a second script escalated the same source into detailed geometry, feeding both the analysis models and the Revit documentation.
What makes this work
The massings are a deliberate space grab, not the final geometry: enough detail to show how much room each node needs and where it clashes, so the team can coordinate against services and facade before committing to a single detailed model. The judgement happens early, when it is still cheap to change.
What changed
The team coordinated every node against the other services early, then mass-analysed all of them, 71 in this case, and documented them, without re-modelling for each stage. The workflow held up across a two to three year project. There was manual finessing on the analysis models, but the bulk of it regenerated from one source.
Notes on maintainability
Because the geometry was script-driven, changes regenerated rather than being remodelled, though the analysis models still took some manual finessing.