Constructing Env. Journal week NO.1

In this week’s tutorial, i got a basic understanding of the subject’s purpose and structure after my tutor went through the subject guide and explained the marking systems and requirements for each of the assignments we will receive.

I am quite excited about this subject as it is the foundation of architecture, a career that i wish to pursue in the future at this stage. I think it would be very helpful to put all my ‘crazy’ design ideas into perspective, and evaluate what REALLY WORKS.

Hopefully i am able to do well in a subject that seperates architects from visual based designers.

Tower building exercise

Without having a great understanding of physics and the prin-ciples of architecture, me and my group based our tower’s struc-ture on whatever we thought would work the best at the time.

We started off with a square shaped base with doube lays of wood blocks on each level, but then we quickly realised that this method would be unstable because the forces generated by the higher blocks wont be passed through the structure, it’ll be passed directly downwards, causing the structure to collapse very quickly.

So then, we decided to work with a circular base. After that, i came up with the idea of stacking the blocks in such a way that i thought would pass the forces down towards the base efficiently.

The design consists of two sections, one thicker section and one thinner one, and they are placed next to each other both hori-zontally and vertically.

Tower building exercise

As the height of the tower gradually increased, we have came to the conclusion that eventhough the tower is really stable and secure (we shook it a few times as a test), the use of wood blocks is not very sustainable, which effects the tower’s height in the long run. Therefore, i decided to change the struc-ture of the tower to the one on the right. It decreses the use of wood blocks but increases the height of the tower at the same time.

However, we have realised that it does not support its weight as well as our previous design, because the vertical contact made between the blocks are mostly linear, not ‘zig-zagged’ which spreads the force through the entire structure.

Tower building exercise

We soon realised that time was running out, so we decided to use the last few min-utes experimenting with different ways of stacking and overall, we thought the best way of stacking the tower was still to build it with our first design. Eventhough it uses more wooden blocks than other designs, it successfully spreads the downward force generated by the structure’s weight around the entire structure.

Tower building exercise

The exercise was concluded by our group pok-ing blocks off the tower to see how the tower holdes up. I think our group did quite well in terms of making our tower secure and stable.

The fact that we were able to take out many of our original building blocks on the bottom few layers showed that the ‘zig zag’ design was quite successful.

This however, is contrasted by our attempts to remove blocks on the top layers where we ex-perimented with other methods, causing a total collapse of the tower.

In conclusion, i found this week’s practical exer-cise very useful, and i personally find this type of learning much easier than taking notes from a book.