Overview
- Key / Essential / Unique Design Features
- Your Big Successes
- Your Big Challenges
- Lessons Learned
There are 3 uniquely essential design features I practiced in my project.
The first feature is the large atrium at the front door. Visitors can be amazed at the large space and inner decoration. At the atrium, visitors can directly see the roof top of the building. At the north end of atrium, visitors can get to second floor by 2 fancy spiral staircases.
The second feature is the exterior glass curtain surrounding the exhibition room. Not only vistors inside exhibition room can enjoy the natrual daylight and outside view, but also people outside can be curious about what is inside the room.
The third feature is the large cafe space on second floor right above the west exhibition room. In Bay Area, an outdoor cafe is the most enjoyable feature of a building. Surrounding by flowers and other plantings, visitors will enjoy the cafe and have a relaxing rest.
The biggest sucess in the whole project would be the bubble diagram stage. It seems like a less important procedure, but it indeed helped drawing a comprehensive building in my head. I figured out the main layout and unique design features at that stage. As a result, it is much easier for me to implement those ideas in the model.
The biggest challenges are all technical challenges. For example, at the very beginning when editing the constraints of walls, I did not set it to the top floor. Instead, I set the offset to make the wall higher. Even if I changed lots of them right later, there were still certain walls left with this mistake. It affects my roof system because sometimes the enclosure and connection problems happened. To overcome this challenge in future, the most effective way is to be carefull with every technical step to avoid future larger and more complicate adjustment.
Another challenge would be that I am not familiar with the actual size of certain rooms. For example, when setting the restrooms, I did not leave enough space for them. As a result, the restrooms were relatively small for the building. To avoid this challenge, I should learn more about the common sense on floor plan, layout, and size.
Designing is never an easy task. Even if BIM modeling can tolerate more mistakes than paper drawing because we can correct them more easily in later stage, advanced and prior high-level designing is important. A good high level designing should not only leave enough space for later detailed designing but also provide a comfortable and clear direction for future low-level designing. In one word, planning beforehand, and planning rightly.
