Create unplaced rooms

If you are lucky enough to have received a detailed design brief that lists all the required rooms in your project, you may want to load these into your project to save time entering them manually. Within Revit, these become ‘unplaced rooms’. In this scenario, when you go to place a room, you will have the option of placing a new room or an existing unplaced room if they have already been created.

Creating unplaced rooms with Dynamo

To automate the creation of these rooms en mass, you can use a simple Dynamo graph. Firstly, create a list of room names in Excel. The Dynamo graph imports this data with an option to remove headers. Note that the data is set to be strings (text). Provisional Room numbers are also generated, but these can be automatically updated at a later date using the renumber rooms graph. Finally, the rooms are created using Clockwork’s ‘Room.UnplacedByNameAndNumber’ node. Before running the script, ensure you are in a standard view (plan, 3D, etc.) and not a schedule or sheet view. Otherwise, Dynamo will be unable to create the rooms.

Troubleshooting

Ensure you run Dynamo using ‘Manual’ or via Dynamo Player, as rerunning the graph will cause duplicate rooms to be created. Another problem that sometimes arises is that the Excel data cannot be imported into Dynamo. This known issue can be resolved by repairing Microsoft Excel in ‘Add or Remove Programs’ within Windows.