Design Journal Entry - Module 12 Wrap-up - Audrey Yan

Overview

• Key / Essential / Unique Design Features

My building is a multi-mass exhibition and learning center. A mostly-single floor arrangement, it is just over 27000 sqft and features classrooms, conference rooms, office, and open exhibit spaces. Here are some key features:

1. Distinct interior route through the exhibits/building
2. South-facing pitched roofs to capture solar energy
3. Approximately ~5 visually distinct building masses (also 5 HVAC zones/air handlers)
4. Unloaded, unconditioned indoor-outdoor glazed walkway
5. Frequent use of clerestory lighting
6. Terraced outdoor dining area
7. Hybrid structural steel and mass timber framing system
• Your Big Successes
• One of my favorite components of the project is actually its layout — although this is something that we designed quite early on in the quarter, I still think it’s one of my key accomplishments. I set out to not just fill the space requirement and kind of place rooms so that they’re just reasonably sized and fit within the space of the building, but to actually design a walk-through experience, a way of arranging the rooms with a lot of thought given to how the person would progress through them. I really like the fact that each of my exhibition spaces has different lighting and spatial characteristics, and that all the other functional spaces are placed with careful thought. A good diagram to illustrate the intentions behind the layout is actually the bubble diagram I created….

• I’m also quite happy with the thought I put into solar PV potential — the roofs are sloped to accommodate a fixed tilt PV system on the roof, and all major roof surfaces are South facing.

• Finally, I’m really happy about my glazing design in particular, as a component of my building envelope. I put a lot of care and thought into where the windows and curtain wall systems should go. I made care to put big windows on South facing walls so there was plenty of natural lighting, and made all my North side windows clerestory lighting only. I also minimized East and West glazing, except in the unconditioned walkway, which is glazed on both sides.

• Your Big Challenges
• Designing the HVAC system was a real challenge for me — it was my first time designing an HVAC system at all, and certainly the first time I’d done it in Revit. I think to achieve the more ambitious energy efficiency goals I had set at the beginning of the quarter would have required me to be a bit more creative with my HVAC solutions than just the typical air-based VAV heating and cooling. However, since it was so new to me, I didn’t dare to try something more complex in case it would become too difficult for me debug without guidance if something went wrong.
• I had some difficulty understanding the calculations in Insight — I remember when analyzing my full building envelope/architectural model, the results on Insight were quite similar to my initial conceptual mass models, and the building was looking quite efficient. However, at one point, I also uploaded my HVAC model onto Insight (maybe by accident, but I don’t quite remember) and it began showing really high numbers for site EUI. I don’t know if it was just not appropriate to upload an HVAC model, or whether my system was just really inefficiently designed… in any case, it was difficult to make sense of the numbers that were being spit back out at me.
• The structural system was ironically (since I studied structural engineering for undergrad lol) really difficult for me! It was really time consuming, and probably contends with the HVAC module as being the most intricate/complex module for me. It was somehow just really difficult for me to connect all the beams/columns properly, and the constant shifting between different views that I needed to do in order to model the elements was also quite jarring. Since I only have a single floor but a massive amount of square footage on that floor, every single area of the building needed its own structural system and nothing could be copied from floor to floor, because there was no second floor. This one was tough.
• Lessons Learned
• Embracing Revit — I procrastinated starting assignments early because I felt so daunted by this software that I had no familiarity with. It turns out that if you just stay patient and calm, most things in Revit are decently intuitive. I think I just felt so intimidated by the software that I caused myself a lot of unnecessary stress over the quarter.
• Following along with the videos — I think if I were to do over the course again, I’d want to actually do the things that Glenn is presenting in the videos while watching the videos. I wasted a lot of time watching the videos, I feel like, because I would never actually absorb any of the content the first time through, since I wasn’t going to be able to remember the correct sequence of actions or which buttons to click on. I would then have to go back and rewatch the videos while trying to do the practice exercise or design journal entry. I feel like I could have saved time if I had just practiced alongside the module videos the first time through.
• I learned a lot about the systems in a building and how they fit together — not only conceptually and mathematically, like in some of my other classes, but also physically, because I literally had to cram everything into my building. I think knowing what I now know about the components of the building, I may have approached the initial stages of the design a little differently. I would think a lot more carefully about wall and ceiling placements so that I would create a plenum space for my HVAC, I would think a lot more carefully about where the plumbing components would go and probably both shape my bathroom spaces differently but also create their wall set ups and relations to mechanical rooms differently. I was lucky that I happened to disperse my mechanical rooms to a good enough extent that none of my HVAC duct sizes became a big issue, but I would definitely pay much closer attention on a second go around not only to having enough mechanical space but to having mechanical space evenly distributed around the building.

Video Presentation / Tour of Your Project Features

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