CONSTRUCTING ENVS – Madelaine Walsh (Week 1) The first Constructing Environments studio ran through the basics of the subject and introduced us to some of the key concepts as well as the types of assessment involved in the subject. For the first week I was in Heather’s studio class. Being introduced to the three main assignments and weekly tasks helped to give us an understanding of what was expected in this subject. Heather also spoke about the ideas of mass construction and the types of materials that were often involved in this type of building. From here, we briefly discussed the behaviour of materials such as concrete, brick and stone and how they were able to cope with different stresses (like tension and compression) and loads within construction. I think it was good to begin talking about this prior to beginning the first activity as it prompted us to think more analytically and structurally about how our towers could be constructed. After this we moved onto the main activity on compression. The class was split into 4 groups of 3-4 people, within which we were asked to construct the highest possible building or tower using wooden (MDF) blocks/bricks. In our class we were also given two plastic dinosaurs therefore there needed to be an opening where the animal could move in/out of. Before we began building the tower, my group took some time to brainstorm a few ideas and play around with the blocks to get an idea of how great a load they could support. We tried different ways to build columns starting with square and rectangular bases; however we found that they failed to support any extra loads.

We decided to build our tower with rounded edges as our group thought that this would create a stronger structure than sharp corners of a square or rectangle shaped building. We layed out a base structure for the building, evenly spacing the bricks apart, then building upon this by placing the next layer of bricks on the gaps between the bricks from the previous layer. Repeating this step we gradually added height to our tower.

The taller the tower got the less steady it became. For the entrance we left an open arch shape for the animal to move in/out through and then worked across from the two sides to re-join the sides of the tower above this arch shape. Some problems were experienced if one side of the tower began to lean more inward or outward affecting the overall stability of the structure, or if the edges rounded too sharply the corners become unsteady. Overall I was surprised that this method was able to hold such a great load- I didn’t expect it.

Before knocking down the building we experimented with methods of de-construction, seeing if we could remove parts of the tower without it collapsing and observing places that could hold increased loads with less support. This showed that our design was able to hold a significant load even when not spread evenly across the whole building. We were successfully able to remove quite a few of the bricks before it collapsed!