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.
For this project I chose my site to be located at the corner of 8th and Alice Street in Oakland Chinatown. I want my building to be a residential space above the commercial area on the first floor. Like other buildings in Oakland Chinatown. Because this is a residential building my main focus was situating the building to have areas with less noise pollution. Being situated at the corner of a block along with a busier intersection in the city, my proposals were centered around providing a courtyard space in the middle of my structure. My initial proposal consists of a taller building on the corner of the main street with more traffic and a shorter L -shaped building on the side neighboring a shorter residential building to not block off as much sunlight for the existing residential building. My second proposal is an oval-shaped-plaza-like building with an opening in the middle. And my final proposal is a U-shaped building. The idea behind this was how the building would have a courtyard and block off a lot of noise for residents, but also be a place where the community could host events.
From the analysis, Proposal #1 was the best. For all three of my proposals, even in the summer there isn't a lot of sunlight hitting any of the middle areas. Proposal 1 has 85% ground and receives direct sun for at least 3 hours while the other two proposals only had 55 % for proposal 2 and 43% for proposal 3. In addition, the structure is not complicated like proposal 2 and is not as dense as proposal 3 the carbon calculated with the metrics is also lower because of the construction material at 1.51 M kgCO2 compared to 2.61 M kgCO2 compared to 2.87 MkgCO2 (proposal 1, 2, and 3 respectively). As for noise analysis, Proposal #3 performed the best but is only slightly better than proposal 1. Surprisingly proposal 1 has a facade green decibel range of 44% while proposal 2 which is more closed off has only 33%.
Based on these performance metrics, proposal 1 has the best overall to provide more comfort in both sunlight and noise for the residents. I mentioned one place that surprised me and disagreed with my instinct but another point that surprised me was proposal 1 and 3 had similar micro climate numbers. 64% was in the comfortable temperature range of light green for both when I expected that since the U shaped building seems to provide more shelter for the ground and should have a higher temperature range.
Three massing images, one per proposal, from the same viewpoint.
