Working share link to your Forma project
One page facade comparison showing both options with their metrics
Typical floor plan image with unit types or zones labelled, plus the unit mix schedule
Floors 1-5 Residential, floors 6 and 7 residential. Floor plan of floors 1-2 of commercial building in the corner of the lot. Residential unit% breakdown after adjusting for building support is 8% for studios and 3-bedrooms and 42% for 1 and 2-bedrooms.
***The two diagonal black lines are old zone lines from site-design which have been removed. They do not have any affect on dimensions (not grid lines)**
One AI render of the chosen scheme
Design memo of 300 to 500 words: how the massing changed from Week 2 and why, what the facade studies showed, what you chose, and where you overrode the automation
I kept the option A concept from Module 2, a stepped building opening to a plaza. The bottom floor is now a commercial space, with the residential building having 5 stories on the left and seven stories on the right, which I adjusted from previously having one homogenous stepped building of 6 and 8 stories with no bottom-floor commercial space. I also created an offset between the bottom floor and residential portion of the main building to meet the +-10% 100,000 GFA requirement (102,911).
My original facade plan used my original north-to-south lot orientation and used the automated face tool to create even windows and balconies facing Shattuck and east on the other side, with no windows on the north end and windows on the south end. This plan also used regular 8x8 windows on the bottom floor. After looking at the sun hour and daylight analyses, I found that this plan created many shading issues. Some windows/balconies were getting too much sun, while others were getting <4 hours in the summer. Then, I realized that if I reoriented my buildings east-to-west, I could make shading and sun hours more even and comfortable for more units. After completing this reorientation, I found that the south and north faces received between 2 and 6 hours of sun, while the east and west ends received 7+ hours. This improve ground sun coverage by 25%, and 98% of the plaza now receives 3+ hours of direct sun compared to 73% for the original design. So, I changed the facades of all of the corner units to have windows and balconies and windows on both their north/south and east/west side, so there is access to both shade and direct sunlight. The building faces 2-3 story buildings to the north and east, so I added larger windows on floors 1-3 to allow more daylight in rather than using balconies and further shading the bottom floors. These are all examples of me having to break the automated facade to better fit my environmental conditions and lot orientation. I also added a curtain facade to the bottom floor to let in more light, and removed the facade on the bottom north facing side as it was completely dark. The extra commercial/retail building still sits 2-stories at the corner of the lot, but is oriented east to west. The north street is also much noisier than the west, so southern lot positioning improves noise exposure for residents.
The total carbon analysis for the lot comes to 2.02M kgCO2e and 20kgCO2e/ft^2. The east-to-west orientation and use of passive heating, along with future module choices, should help further improve sustainability and energy efficiency, which is important to me for this project.
Due to my lot size and shape, my residential units are slightly larger north-to-south than was suggested for length in the weekly review, so my unit distribution comes out to about 8% for studios and 3-bedrooms and 42% for 1 and 2-bedrooms, which fits within the allowable ranges.