A4610 Building Systems II
Required Technology LectureRobert Heintges
COURSE DESCRIPTION
The role of technical-utilitarian systems in architectural design is explored in a design project, lectures and field trips. In the design of a loft building for the industrial arts, students explore how a structure's technical systems work, are detailed and interact. Three-student groups work on the nine-week problem with a visiting critic architect-engineer team.
Contemporary building enclosure, environmental control, and structural systems that are commonly employed in this type of building are summarized in lectures given at the beginning of the semester. These lectures also outline the following: the increasing domain of technical-utilitarian systems, in terms of the functions they perform, the space they occupy, and the amount of a building's hard-cost they consume; the evolving interdependence among structure, building enclosure and environmental control systems. Lecture topics are developed through the study of 20th century advances in building technologies, their impact on space-making, and how they have been used (or not used) to inform composition and expressive gestures.
The design project focuses on the development and detailing of the building's structural, enclosure and environmental control systems. Critical systems are designed numerically. Drawings, models, and (at the students option) computer programs are used to carefully resolve relationships between components and across systems. The impact of structural and enclosure systems and materials, and environmental control systems on the building's composition and form is considered as part of the design process. Students are encouraged to use the technical resolution of this programmatically-simple building as a vehicle for developing their individual stance toward the role of utilitarian systems in design. Field trips will be taken to a medium-rise building in construction, and an operating building employing a range of state of the art technical systems.
LECTURES
1. The increasing domain of technical-utilitarian systems
2. Environmental control I
3. History and evolution of the industrial-loft block
4. Building enclosure systems (cladding materials and methods): Richardson, Prouve, Mies
5. Environmental Control II
6. Structural systems for industrial buildings
7. Building enclosure and the industrial-loft block
8. Environmental control for multistory industrial buildings
GRADES
Grades are based on successful completion of class assignments, including:
Three homework assignments relating to class lectures
Attendance at crits and pin-ups
Design project design documents (both drawings and technical report are required)
REFERENCES
Forester, The Materials Revolution , MIT Press, 1990
Banham, The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment , The University of Chicago Press, 1984
Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age , Chicago, 1975
Brookes, Alan, The Building Envelope , London, 1990
Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command , Norton, 1955
Nervi, Structures , F. W. Dodge Corporation, 1956
Olin, H., Construction, Principles, Materials and Methods , Van Nostrand-Rheinhold, 1991
Sands, H., Wall Systems: Analysis and Detail , New York, 1986
Goumain, P., High Technology Workplaces , Van Nostrand-Rheinhold, 1992
Billington and Goldsmith, eds., Technique and Aesthetics in the Design of Tall Buildings , Institute for High-Rise Habitat, LeHigh University, 1986
Jordy, The Impact of European Modernism in the Mid-Twentieth Century , Oxford, 1978
Ockman, ed., The Filter of Reason: Work of Paul Nelson , Columbia Books on Architecture, 1990