ARCHITECTURAL ENGINEERING
Applying engineering principles and practices to building design and construction. My specialty focused on MECHANICAL SYSTEM design with general studies in structural and electrical engineering.
This approach provided me with groundwork in the total process of designing and constructing a building.
Senior year of college was highlighted with a year long senior design project. Our project was to design a building for a client in Milwaukee. This project, while not actually going to be built, carried all of the responsibilities and tasks that go into a full design and project planning . Our team’s job was to design this building from the ground up and take it from the clients ideas to full architectural and mechanical plans. Our client was The Italian Community Center located near downtown Milwaukee. They were looking to expand their existing conference facilities and add a large hotel onto their site.
Revit rendering of our completed building. it shows the challenges faced with adding a high ceiling ballroom and how that would interface with the rest of the hotel on the right and the existing facility in the back left.
The largest challenge facing this project was helping the client determine what their goals were. They were unsure of a budget at this stage and unsure of the features and size of the facility they were wanting to build. Many meetings were scheduled to pitch ideas and develop a solid budget and building program.
My specialty within the Architectural Engineering program focused on Building Mechanical Systems. within my team of 7 myself and one other student were responsible for the mechanical system selection and design. Again, the clients were unsure of the type of systems they wanted for this building. It was our job to use energy modeling software to analyze our building’s heating and cooling requirements. From there, we researched different kinds of mechanical systems from VAV, chilled beams, and VRF systems. We decided the VRF or Variable Refrigerant Flow system would be the best fit for our building due to the limited space for ductwork that we had to work with. The major challenge with this systems is that no one in Wisconsin that we talked to had designed such a system before. Up until recently, these systems weren't designed to be used in temperatures below 10 or 15 degrees Fahrenheit. New systems however could be used to heat the building to about 0° F and then supplemented with electric heat to temperatures beyond that. It was a challenge to design this system without adviser or professional oversight but we were able to successfully defend our design in front of a panel for our final presentation.
Senior design also required that a physical model of our building. Always wanting to take a hands on approach, I helped with a majority of the model building and did the wiring and lighting. The materials used were acrylic, poster board, spray paint, and scale model artificial turf. Most of the cutting was done using the school’s laser cutter.