Overview
- Key / Essential / Unique Design Features that you explored in your project.
- Garden Entry
- Skylight
- Green roof access
- Balconies
- The expanding and slanting building body
- Key Successes
- I am happy with my architecture since it is very original and extremely time consuming to put together.
- I think I did well in the structural component because every level is different and I spent a long time studying the structures and putting it together.
- Challenges
- Mass walls vs. architectural walls
Last quarter, I mostly designed for boxy buildings. They are conventional, functional, and copy-paste-able, but I wanted to be more creative for this quarter’s project. So I started my model with a mass and made a lot of curved walls. I could just put mass walls and curtain systems, but mass walls cannot be split into sections for my design goals (a lot of curtain walls). I had to put slanted architectural walls as close to the mass as possible, and the angle trial and error process was exhausting.
- The expanding shape caused problems in HVAC and plumbing systems
It was very hard for me to route the HVAC and plumbing systems for the first floor already because of the shape of my building, which is narrow and have a lot of shafts.
- Site does not align with building’s center
I spent a lot of time tweaking the site file and the building file’s coordinates. They align when open as linked files but fails to be aligned in BIM360. I did not find anywhere to adjust that online.
- Lessons Learned
- Researching and consolidating the building structure before modeling is critical. Sketches and plans before getting to the task saves one a lot of time coordinating the different systems. I have never learnt architecture and did not do enough research beforehand. So in my model, a lot of architectural components that need updates and it’s just very difficult to coordinate among so many systems.
- Energy efficiency might be hard to achieve. For the Insight energy model, I used the detailed building components. This could be bad given there must be small openings in the curtain walls or between the slanted walls that I later added. I do not fully trust the efficiency model, but there are definitely a lot to improve. However, learning about the wall and floor materials was fun. I spent a lot of time searching for the right material for my building.
- I should have been more observant before the class. Since architecture to me is an unfamiliar subject, I did not know what basic components are expected for a building. For example, I did not leave enough space for the mechanical room between the bathrooms, and I kind of designed the bathrooms and the plumbing systems in a weird way. I did not expect modeling these systems to take me such a long time. I am confident to say that I have grown a lot during this journey!
Video Presentation / Tour of Your Project Features
My video introduction and slidedeck used for the video can be viewed here:
