Location: 10 Waterloo Quadrant, Auckland CBD, New Zealand (circa. 2005)
Design Brief: 23 story building comprising over 250 hotel apartments
CAD System: StruCad
My role as the main design draughtsman was to detail the structural steel elements within our project scope. This comprised the balcony support system, the two fire escape stair cores and the roof structures; all according to the architect’s design and engineer’s specifications and has been the largest project I had been given responsibility of delivering up to that point in my career.
Each floor had a unique balcony arrangement and on those balconies each one had a structural support system for the balcony above, whilst also housing the sliding sun shades for the floor below.
The main challenge for me was the balcony supports. As each floor was different I needed to come up with a method of approach when modelling the structural support so that I wouldn’t need to go through and model every connection individually. With the sheer number of connections the solution needed to cut this drawing time to an absolute minimum.
In the end I took the advice of my senior colleague and took the time to write a parametric connection based on the angular input of each member. Dedicating the time at the beginning of the project paid dividends with a greatly reduced modelling time overall.
A major issue was the inclination of the roof plane on the end retail space. The space of the building was angular and the way the architect had indicated the falls and eaves lines would have meant that the roof would’ve had a twist through it.
After some discussion we determined the architect hadn’t intended this design discrepancy and so I was able to model the roof in a single pitch and demonstrate the new roof intersection lines. This reconciled the angular nature of the roof design and was a wonderful way of demonstrating the advantages of 3-D modelling.
Since then I’m pleased to see more have taken up modelled structures to improve the visualisation of their concepts.
The variety of complexity within the job and problem solving through the issues was enjoyable and a great learning experience of a project well done.
