Tuesday, February 6, 2018

Week 5 - Bach Tran - B4 Underground Intelligent Building


Hello everyone,

Marino Da Costa and I, are going to research and design an underground intelligent building. Nowadays, people keep competing for constructing the tallest building in the world. We wonder if building taller and taller building make any sense. According to the latest report of Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, on average, up to 27% of the height of the top ten tallest buildings is vanity height (non-occupiable height). Take Burj Khalifa as an example, at 244 m, the vanity height of this building can be a stand-alone skyscraper. I think this is such a huge waste of money, labor and materials. Besides, skyscraper like these pose a higher risk for their surrounding in case of collapsing due to earthquake or other disasters. My partner and I wonder wouldn’t it be more reasonable to build deeper into the earth. We believe an underground building will have a higher chance of surviving disaster and less effects to the environment. In this project, we are going to look at previously built underground shelters, to learn about the probable construction materials, budget, as well as architectural and structural designs. In addition, we will need to identify issues and concerns for building underground structures, and attempt to integrate intelligent features to make such building efficient. Some of possible issues are waste disposal, energy sources, accessibility, building materials degradation, and so on. At the end, we are aiming to present a Revit model for our underground intelligent building.

Citation
http://www.ctbuh.org/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=k%2BK%2FgAvA7YU%3D&tabid=5837&language=en-US
Comments:

Shuyuan,
I would love to have a HVAC system with sensors and controls for my house. This winter I got a ridiculously high gas bill because of heating. I had to manually raise the temperature at night and kept forgetting to lower it in the morning, as the result the whole building was kept heating all day. I wonder if it would be possible to integrate such sensors and controls to an existing HVAC system, also will the cost of installing such system worth the cost of electricity or gas that it can save.

Dung Tran,
I really like the minimalist and futuristic look of this building. It would be interesting to see how you design and HVAC system for such building. I concern that a glass envelop like this will require a huge amount of heat in the winter. In addition, you might want to think about a security system or something that can ensure the privacy for the occupants if the building is to be built in an urban setting.

Allison Abad,
I am a big fan of Elon Musk and his ambitious vision of human living on Mars. I think finding a building method on Mars would be a very challenging task. I still think that it would be more realistic to have some astronauts on Mars to control all the robots and drones. In addition to limited energy sources, Mars is infamous for intense dust storms, thus you might want to take that in consideration. Good luck on your project!

1 comment:

  1. Bach,
    Your project subject: underground intelligent building is very interesting; you have addressed some of the most important concerns that we have nowadays about tall buildings. You have mentioned that about 27% of the top ten tallest building are vanity height; I was hoping that this fact was elaborated a little more, and I agree that building underground seems safer, but I question if the environment impact will be less on the surrounding.

    ReplyDelete

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