Constructing Env. - Journal

Week No. 2 Johnny Wang

Tower Construction Exercise No.2

In last week’s tower building exercise, i have learnt that the more evenly the tower car-ries its weight, the more stable the tower will be. However, this has to be achieved using the minimal amount of materials in order to reach its maximum height.

In this week’s tutorial, even though the mate-rials that is being used has changed, the prin-ciples should remain the same.

In last week’s ching reading, it stated that tri-angular shapes are the most effective in terms of stability, therefore we decided to go with a triangular build in this week’s tutorial.

The tower has three sides, a triangular base, and each sides of the tower con-sists of many triangular shapes that hold the three sides together.

The triangular base provides stabili-ty, and the fact that the bottom of the tower is heavier and wider than the top keeps the tower stable also. Further-more, the tension created by the tri-angles on each of the three sides allow the tower to maintain its upright form, and also contributes spreading the forces placed upon the tower evenly throughout the structure.

This structure is simple, however very effective. We were able to build it rela-tively quickly to a fairly decent height considering the amount of materials available

After we were able to place the coffee cup ontop of the tower, we then tried to break the tower by pushing it down with our hands to see how the tower breaks down.

I gave the tower a decent push, and it felt very stable. (More stable than i expected at the time.) The tower actually took a far while to break down considering that it is made out of thin bolsawood sticks, which are weak on their own.

Before we attempted to break the tower, we pre-dicted that the tower would most likely breaki n the middle section because that was where we joint the top and bottom halves of the tower to-gether with PVA glue.

Eventually, the tower snapped, and just like we predicted, the tower broke in the middle section where it was joint by PVA glue.

We then attempted to do the same experiment to only the top half of the tower, and it felt alot harder to break with downward force as it has a smaller base and no joints with PVA glue.

Overall, i think our experiment was successful, and the “triangle” theory presented in Ching was proven to be very effective through our ex-periments.