Working share link to your Forma project, view access for the teaching team.
Forma Board and Site Design are shared with the teaching team (Cesar Escalante, Glenn Katz, Juan Bautista Romaniuk, Luis Pablo Trujillo) with View access.
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.
My site is a 34,621 ft² block at the corner of Oxford St and Center St in downtown Berkeley. It is two blocks from the Downtown Berkeley BART station and right across from the UC Berkeley campus, so it fits a transit-oriented project with little or no parking. Before drawing anything, I ran sun hours and wind on the empty site. In winter, 94% of the ground gets at least three hours of sun, and the only shaded part is the south edge along Oxford Ln, which sits in the shadow of the buildings across the lane. For wind, 83% of the ground was comfortable for sitting or standing, but the empty lot was windier than the streets around it because nothing was blocking the wind.
I tested three different strategies, each with about 100,000 SF, retail on the ground floor, and housing above. Option 1 (Tower + Podium) puts an 8-story tower at the Oxford St corner on a 3-story podium and leaves a plaza on the west side. Option 2 (Finger Bars) splits the building into three 5-story north-south bars with two courts between them. Option 3 (Stepped L) steps down from 7 stories to 3 toward campus and uses a west wing to protect a courtyard that opens to the southeast.
The results were clearer than I expected. Option 2 had the best wind (88%) and the least facade noise, but its narrow courts got the least winter sun (26% of the ground), and 34% of its facade scored below 27 for daylight. Option 3 had the best winter open space (63%), but its stepped volumes shaded each other. Option 1 had the best daylight, with 82% of its facade scoring 32 or higher, plus the best winter facade sun (70%) and the lowest energy use intensity (30 kBtu/ft²).
I recommend Option 1. The deciding number for me was daylight, because for apartments it affects both how livable the units are and how much lighting energy they use. Its main weakness is noise, since 49% of the facade is above 65 dB(A) on the Oxford St side. In Week 3, I plan to deal with this by putting the core and circulation on that side and orienting the units west and south.
The biggest surprise was the tower. I expected Option 3 to be the most balanced and the tower to make wind conditions worse. Instead, Option 1 kept wind comfort at 84%, almost the same as the empty site. In fact, all three options improved on the baseline, because the new buildings blocked wind that used to cross the open lot. The stepping that I thought would help daylight in Option 3 actually created shade where the volumes meet.
Three massing images, one per proposal, from the same viewpoint.
