Why is it important to accurately model the land features of your project site with a toposurface?
- What aspects of a building design are most affected by the terrain features?
Inaccurate modeling of the land features may pose complications with the structure and overall the sturdiness of the building. A structural engineer must take into consideration the terrain features, soil type, weather conditions, and even the construction materials used in order to account for and factor in seismic restraints as well. As modelers, it is crucial to accurately model the land features in order to forecast potential roadblocks and challenges during the construction process.
When designing a project...
- Should the building adapt to the terrain?
- Or, should you adapt the terrain to the building?
Ultimately, the terrain will determine the type of building that is suitable for construction. As an engineer, many projects I worked on revolved around seismic retrofits to ensure buildings and most importantly, humans, were protected against seismic activity. The geotechnical report generated by a structural engineer serves as a tool to ensure the terrain is capable of sustaining the loads presented by a building. An uneven toposurface presents many challenges not only when designing on Revit, but as well as during the construction process. The greater the challenges imposed by an uneven surface, the greater the construction costs, which is a significant factor that must be considered.
What considerations affect a project team's decision-making when deciding the floor-to-floor height to use in a multi-story building?
- From a real estate developer's perspective?
- From a designer's perspective?
- From an engineer's perspective?
- From a builder's perspective?
- From an owner's perspective?
What are the advantages of stacking the levels of a multi-story building vertically?
- Can you share an interesting example of a building that doesn’t vertically stack (where the floor plates change their shaped radically between the floor levels)?
- What were the advantages or reasons for non-vertical stacking?
Stacking the levels of a multi-story building vertically poses significant advantages in terms of reducing construction costs, standardizing the overall layout of the building for easy navigation, and ensuring measurements are accurate from floor to floor. By standardizing the layout of each floor, construction costs may reduce since the construction process becomes standardized as well — it is much easier to perform cookie-cutter work on twenty floors, as you are able to master and refine the work from floor-to-floor versus constructing twenty completely different floors. From a code perspective, it is extremely valuable to stack levels to facilitate the design of MEPF systems. For instance, in a building, it is incredibly challenging to design each floor with an MEPF system in a different location from floor to floor. Stacking rooms, such as mechanical or electrical rooms, enables easy access for troubleshooting problems and ultimately facilitates the designer’s job. In my experience, being able to stack my upper floor upon the lower level served as a great tool to ensure my dimensions were not only persistent, but accurate.
Why do stairs follow specific proportions with a set relationship between the tread length and riser height?
- How can building modeling help prevent the mistakes that often occur when designing and installing stairs?