Design Journal Entry - Module 12 Wrap Up

Journal Entry For

Module 12 - Sharing Your Project

Overview

Replace this text with your reflections on your design journey through class from a higher level and share your insights about the entire experience. What were:

Key / Essential / Unique Design Features that you explored in your project.

Plant-inspired biomorphic building envelope

Lichen-covered bioreceptive exterior
Extreme sustainability

Net energy production (11.1 kBtu/sf/yr produced)
Passive thermal management and evaporative cooling

Creating a building with a very low WWR that doesn’t look brutal or oppressive

Your Big Successes -- what worked very well and what features you're most proud to share as examples to inspire others.

I’m very happy with the visual appearance of my building envelope. I think it’s really fun and succeeds at my goal of creating a plant-like, biomorphic building design.
It took tons of wrestling, but I eventually managed to create curtain walls for my building envelope, which is both curved and sloped. That was awfully tricky!

Your Big Challenges -- what aspects of the project created the biggest challenges and what would you do differently (in hindsight) to avoid or overcome these challenges.

My biggest challenge overall was overcoming minor misalignments within my model. For example, there was somehow initially a slight misalignment between the building core on each of my floors, so I had to carefully reposition each of them so that the elevator shafts and stairwells lined up properly. A similar issue prevented me from creating automatic beam systems on each level of my structural model, requiring me to manually draw the bounds of every beam system. I’ve learned that tiny misalignments that arise during the early stages of the design process can snowball into major compatibility problems between models, so I’ll be much more careful next time, especially whenever working with abnormal geometries like my slanted, curved, flower-shaped building envelope.
Another significant challenge was creating curtain walls for the geometry of my building envelope, which was both curved and inwardly sloping. I had to re-make my masses several times before I was finally able to create them.

Lessons Learned -- what sage words of advice would you share with other students who are embarking on a similar project.

Make sure your features in your interior levels are properly aligned! Small misalignments can thwart automatic feature creation down the line, and you might end up tearing your hair out for hours fixing something across multiple linked models that could have initially been solved in only a few minutes.
Use model coordination early and often! It will help you find conflicts between linked models, for example your structural and HVAC models, that you simply won’t notice otherwise.
If you’re spending lots of time trying to fix an issue in your model that you don’t understand, reach out to more experienced users for help!