Design Journal Entry - Module 4

In my first design Journal Entry, I proposed that the location for the center is right next to the Zhongguancun North Rd. That location is in my hometown Beijing so I can easily get related data or background information. That place is in Haidian district, the cultural center of Beijing. With relatively a high education level, people here are more interested about our learning and exhibition center, and we could show our project to more people. This location is right between Tsinghua University and Peking University, the top2 universities in China. Tsinghua University has long been my dream school, and I have been there for thousands of times. I am confident that our center can act as an irreplacable role in this educational Mecca.

However, I changed my mind in the process of digging deeper. Since the location I chose last time was in the “best” district —— Haidian, and it’s between the top2 university in China, the cost of land development right might be too high for me to afford. Besides, there are several tall buildings around, which might hinder the building from natural light. In that way I choose another location for our center, which is as shown below:

This new site is located right next to the Beijing Botanic Garden, and it’s next to the road so ot’s easy to access to. There’s no high-rise or even low-rise in the surrounding area so it’s easy for the building to capture sunlight and utilize it efficiently. The location is also flat enough so we do not to care much about the topography influence.

After we confirm on our site location, the Climate Consultant 6.0 is applied to do a thorough research on the local limate. In the temperature range figure, we can find that Beijing is pretty cold in winter(15°F -9.4°C mean in Jan) and hot in summer(80°F 26.7°C mean in July). Thus we need to design a powerful and efficient HVAC system to make the temperature more comfortable. In the wind velocity range figure, it’s obvious that there is little wind in Beijing. This is quite reasonable, since Beijing is a city surrounded by mountains in West, North, and East. Thus we can not consider the wind power generation in searching for our energy resources. In the psychromatric chart, we find that the place is 6.7% naturally comfortable. Plenty strategies,(993 hours of sun shading of windows, 1357 hours of cooling and dehumidification, 3756 hours of heating and humidification…) are applied. Since Beijing is cold in winter and hot in summer, we need 15.5% of active cooling and 42.9% of active heating. This might be a serious problem need to be solved when designing the HVAC system.

Topography of the site on Sketchup.

3.1 Design Alternative 1

This is the architectual design of my center. The design consists of three parts: The hexagonal main building with an “M” stlye hollow out, which stands for my family name “Meng”; a corridor, and a hemispherical botanical garden.

! When I create my energy model, there comes up with a weird problem: as you can see in the figure above, the 1st floor of the main building is not included in the energy model. I

3.2 Design Alternative 2