2.13.2008

Brookline High School

It was a pleasure to review the work of Brookline High’s advanced engineering class which recently completed designs for a high rise tower structure for downtown Denver’s Union Station Square. The program was somewhat open ended and left up to interpretation by each two person team. Some students programmed their tower with uses like retail, office and residential. A few teams were much more inventive with programs ranging from museums, a community resource center, and a movie theater for example.
The real crux of this design problem was the fact that each tower had to be designed with popsicle sticks, paper, glue and fishing line. And, each tower had to support 3 separate 1 kilogram weights. That’s crazy weight for a bunch of glued together popsicle sticks. In addition, the required height minimum created buildings that were 100 stories or more when properly scaled.
Clearly the engineering aspects of this design program generated much about the geometries on the table. Many of the teams set out to create a solid, well built structure that would support the loading requirements and meet the minimum height requirements. Some of them ‘Killed’ it. There were extra credit points awarded for the most efficient structures (wt of structure / wt supported). Needless to say, some towers were built like tanks and this generated some discussion about cost vs. safety. Generally, the heavier the structure, the more it would cost to build (in the real world). Had this been a competition for the real thing, many towers could have been immediately eliminated.
By far the lightest structures were those that exploited the true structural nature of each building material. For example, almost every tower that used fishing line in lieu of sticks had some weight reduction. Sticks that were used to span with their depth in section to support loading rather than placed ‘on-the-flat‘ created a more efficient structure = lighter towers. In general if a team built a ‘platform’ with sticks on the flat for holding their weights and had sticks in tension where fishing line could have been used, they had heavy towers.
Ultimately, as an architect, I was most interested in how the design process, loading requirements and program translated to form and façade. Louis Sullivan coined the phrase ‘Form follows function’ in the early 20th century. If a tower functions as an office building should it look the same as that of a movie theater? Or 10 floors of condos? And how is that different from retail on the bottom floor? The towers that were most successful dealt with these issues in some way.
Placing the façade on two sides of the model was a requirement of the project. Interestingly, many teams decided to represent materiality with suggestions of real materials or some kind of fenestration. For example, several teams photocopied images of brick and applied it to their facades even though when properly scaled each brick may measure several meters tall (in reality a brick is about 2 3/8” tall). A more accurate representation of brick might have been just a red façade to indicate a field. At that scale, mortar joints disappear and the overall visual appearance is monolithic.
This tower was particularly interesting to me in terms of its skin and design in general. The base geometry is influenced by the requirements of occupying the site and providing a platform that hovers over Denver’s historical train station. At a point above the station and presumably a shift in program, the tower takes an elegant twist. The structure at the ‘twist’ is triangulated and returns to a cubic bay which is repeated four times. The skin of the tower is just as elegant as the structure. The geometric pattern alludes to the cubic geometry of the tower but each cube is askew and what could have been a simple grid becomes a vibrant and seemingly textured surface. The ‘skin,’ with its variation in color, is scaled appropriately for this structure and a fitting representation of what’s going on behind it. It didn’t win any awards for weight, but one could see how replacing the cross bracing with line would reduce over a dozen sticks; and then, we’d really have something!