Working share link to your Forma project, view access for the teaching team.
Comparison matrix, one page.
Design memo of 300 to 500 words: what you read in the site, the three strategies, what the analysis said, your recommendation, and the surprise.
This site is located at 717 Donohoe Street in East Palo Alto, California. About half of the site layout is currently vacant while the other half has existing single family homes that are assumed to be nonexistent. The site is bordered by Donohoe Street on the south side, a church on the east side, Cooley Ave on the west side, and residential properties on the north side. The three designs follow the same structure meaning the ground level is commercial space and the upper 5 levels are designed to be residential space. Proposal 1 has an L-shape building on the northeast corner of the property, proposal 2 has a U-shaped building with the bottom of the U facing south and oriented in the middle of the property, and proposal 3 is a rectangular building located along the east side of the property. Some common themes between all of the buildings are that the side of the building facing Donohoe street is shown as being very noisy and the microclimate is about the same for each of the building designs. For proposal 1, the analysis showed that the sun hours and daylighting are very good except for at the bottom of the inner corner where the building turns. Proposal 1 blocks the houses behind the site from sunlight which could cause those tenants to be unhappy with the building design. In proposal 2, I tried to fix this by not building directly next to the houses, so I positioned the building at the south side of the site with the U-shape facing north. However, this design is not ideal for this site because the inner side of the building does not get much sunlight or daylight and the longest wall faces the noisiest roadway. Proposal 3 fixes most of these problems - the daylight and sun hours are consistent across the whole building, there is a smaller wall facing the busy road, the wind is not impacted too much, and this design has the lowest carbon intensity. For these reasons, I am proposing design number 3 for this site. One thing I am surprised by is that the carbon for proposal 3 is the lowest even though this is the greatest gross area building. After looking at each of the levels, I realized this is because the area for the ground floor level that uses concrete is the smallest; I think this plays a major role in contributing to the lower carbon intensity.
Three massing images, one per proposal, from the same viewpoint.
Proposal 1:
Proposal 2:
Proposal 3:
