Design Journal Entry - Module 8

Your Design Journal entries this week should highlight your design thinking that influenced your decisions about:

• My overall strategy for the structural system is to use the visibly aesthetic combination of curtain walls and structural steel. I think this will be visually appealing as well as structurally sound. Above are a couple of snapshots from throughout the process.

• I used mostly steel, with some concrete. The material is steel. For the columns, I used W12x40 members. For the beams, I used W12x26 members. For the joists (beam system), I used W8x10 members. I used concrete footers (72”x48”x18”) at each column for the structural foundation. For the structural floor, I used the 3” LW concrete on 2” Metal Deck option.

• Since I have a circular building, I placed the columns and beams in a radial grid. I tried to place columns no more than 30’ apart to ensure beam spans were less than that.

• There are a couple of features in my building that posed a little bit of a challenge. At the entrance of the building, I wanted visitors to be able to look at the SMR up to the fifth level. This meant that I couldn’t place steel members in that area. A couple of other typical challenges were around the two shafts in the building - the stairs and the elevator shafts. Also, I had to move an exterior door because of the location of one of the columns.

***I’m glad I did the coordination and clash detection walk through. I found two big errors that I need to correct before moving forward with the rest of the building design***