Wing Height Editor

What is a Wing?

In TESSA, buildings (or blocks), are made of a number of wings, each containing at list one core. Linear blocks are made of a single wing, L-shape are made of two wings, U-shape buildings are made of three wings, etc. This is illustrated below. 

In some instances, cores can be shared between two wings. These cores will always align with the tallest wing to allow continuous vertical access throughout the building and maintain fire distances. 

How to use the Wing Editor?

The Wing Editor tool allows you to manually adjust the height of each building's wing, after a Design Option was automatically generated. We call this "post-processing". The Wing Editor is the first of a series of upcoming post-processing tools, aimed at providing you greater flexibility and control over how Design Options are articulated, and ultimately how to better respond to design requirements and site context.

After selecting the building which needs to be edited in the Canvas, white squares, otherwise called "handles", are shown at the top of each building's wing. Selecting one of the handle enables the Wing Editor and a textbox appears on screen, as shown below.

 You have three options to adjust the height:

1. Use the up and down arrows on your keyboard
2. Click on the number shown in the textbox and enter the number of floors you want the wing to be
3. Click the chevron arrows within the textbox to adjust the height up or down

When changing a wing, a grey shape let you preview the skeleton of the future massing. A number located on the roof of the shape-guide indicates how many floors are to be added or removed. In the example below, +3 indicates hat three floors are going to be added to the second wing of the building. 

You can validate your changes by pressing enter, or clicking away. The resulting building will be generated, and corresponding metrics re-calculated automatically. 

Please note:

• Where a core is serving multiple wings, it will increase in height to the highest of the wings it serves. 
• You can save the resulting edited Design Option using the Save icon of the toolbox (see below).
  If you do not save an edited Design Option and modify the brief or site property, new Design Options automatically generated will populate the Explore Table and your changes might be lost. 

Metrics Synchronisation

When a wing height is adjusted, all associated metrics are automatically recalculated. The Inspector on the right hand side and Canvas row of the Explore table always corresponds to the Design Option shown in the Canvas, they will therefore start to synchronise as soon as a change is triggered. Cost and carbon related metrics might take a few seconds to calculate. 

The number of floors shown will represent the highest number of floors for that building. 

Before:

After: