Key / Essential / Unique Design Features
This building can best be treated under one heading: sustainability. My vision for the building was to reduce the environmental impact while providing a healthy environment for the users. The weather played a critical role in my design. The location of my project is set at the city of Acapulco in Mexico, with weather that hovers around 30 °C during daylight and 24° C at night during the year. A key aspect of my building was to address this warm temperature, so an open space is the fundamental predominant strategy to take advantage of energy savings. Acapulco is sunny mainly during the year, so it is crucial to have less cumulative insolation to protect the internal environment and spend less in cooling the spaces of a building in this location. This project was exploratory and interpretative in nature. I used sustainable strategies such as vertical louvers for eastern or western exposures to take advantage of the shadings, also overhangs, and awnings; whose, beyond the shading, I think give an improvement to the aesthetic of the building.
There are a number of instruments available for efficient energy consumption. This project takes advantage of the sun by placing solar panels on the south face of the building. The primary inclusion criteria for the pv panels were the height of the building and the roof configuration, which allows to set and modify the elevation in further analysis of the inclination of those artifacts, without compromising the aesthetic of the project.
Big Successes
The first step in this process was to design the mass, Data management and analysis were performed using the Energy Optimization feature under the Analyze tab. Once the information was extracted, it was first necessary to set the final form considering the information that the software provided. I consider a strong success the implementation of the software to set an external initial approach to the design of the project. Also, I consider that the geometrical and symmetrical form of the building worked very well for the future entries, making easy to advance by copying or mirroring features between levels. This is an important feature to consider for future designs.
Big Challenges
The envelope of the building was a perfect hexagon, however the configuration of the roof was not. The roofing systems has different slopes on the south-west side due to the open space that has the building. In addition, on the projection of the balcony on the south side, change the slopes again on the roof. Because of the previously explained, the biggest challenge was to design the structure that supports the system, there were beams with so different slopes and angles that required an individual approach for their modeling. In future projects I would probably try to create a more geometric form, or consider the time consumption of modeling a complex structure.
Lessons Learned
I definitely recommend taking advantage of Professor Glenn and Nico's knowledge in the design of every project entry check-in, ask them tips on how to plan the design of your systems before starting modeling. The planning stage will save you a lot of time in comparison if you begin sketching without a specific idea.
I will recommend something repeated on every class assignment: consider implementing the future system. I noticed the importance of trying to foresee and prevent future clashes by integrating the whole system with every weekly check-in. Every week there was some new detail that needed to be fixed. Even though it was an exciting journey in which I learned a lot.