Greenhouse construction

Who it is for

Engineers and drafters at greenhouse builders and installers in greenhouse horticulture who model facades and roofs as curtain walls.

Tools you build

• Glass area per facade and for the roof
• Profile length per type: glazing bars, posts, rails, gutter and ridge
• Find missing panes and glazing bars
• Check that every roof plane has the right grid
• An order list to CSV for Excel

The final list comes with the lessons.

An example

How many square metres of greenhouse glass are there per facade and in the roof? Plinth panels and empty panels do not count.

from Autodesk.Revit.DB import *

doc = __revit__.ActiveUIDocument.Document

panels = (FilteredElementCollector(doc)
    .OfCategory(BuiltInCategory.OST_CurtainWallPanels)
    .WhereElementIsNotElementType())

glass = {}
for panel in panels:
    if panel.Name != "Kasglas 4 mm":
        continue  # plinth panels and empty panels do not count
    facade = panel.LookupParameter("Gevel")
    where = facade.AsString() if facade else "Roof"
    m2 = UnitUtils.ConvertFromInternalUnits(
        panel.get_Parameter(BuiltInParameter.HOST_AREA_COMPUTED).AsDouble(),
        UnitTypeId.SquareMeters)
    glass[where] = glass.get(where, 0) + m2

for where in glass:
    print("{}: {:.2f} m²".format(where, glass[where]))
print("Total: {:.2f} m²".format(sum(glass.values())))

Zuid: 95.04 m²
Oost: 146.44 m²
Noord: 95.04 m²
West: 148.50 m²
Roof: 621.24 m²
Total: 1106.25 m²

The practice model uses Dutch names: "Gevel" (facade) is a project parameter and "Kasglas 4 mm" the glass panel type. In IronPython 2.7, put # -*- coding: utf-8 -*- at the top when you use characters such as ². Checked against the Revit API 2025 documentation; not yet run in a real Revit.