w e e k 1 j o u r n a l

s a m h o r w o o d6 3 7 5 3 3

m a s s construction

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Sam Horwood

c o n t s r u c t i o n c h a l l e n g e

We were given small wooden bricks and larger clay bricks to begin with and asked to build something tall, as tall as we could. We decided to start with a brick wall knowing that this was a good way to get high and still stay sturdy because of the way the load would be distributed. This is a diagram of how the brick wall load system works in that the bricks are placed on top of 50% of the brick bellow it meaning that the loads are spred diagonally to the two bricks below making the wall studier and able to be built higher.

This worked well for the most part, however, as the wall grew the stability of the wall decreased rather dramitcally so we needed to find a solution that would make the wall study again. The building blocks were quite lightweight and this meant that there wasn’t a great amount of compression occuring hence a light downward force and an unstable wall. To overcome this we decided to place some heavier clay bricks to act as dead loads on the wall and hopefully making to wall more self supported.

We were starting to run out of blocks for the project so we took a dramatic turn and

decided to produce a singualar tower to make the building higher very quickly. We

again used the theories of mass constuction to produce of towered structure that was

efficient with it’s use of bricks but also stayed study.

We developed this design because it seemed to us to be the most study solution that would

result in a great height, stacking blocks in square shapes that rotated on a 45 degree

angle each step up. This way the load path was the sam as that of the brick wall but gained height each step a lot quicker,

however it did not work as well as we would have hoped. The tower itself started to sway

and lean heavily to one side. Instead of rebuilding from stratch we added some weight also creating a

horizontal cantilever in the process to bring the tower’s ceter of gravity to 0

degrees. Time was at our mercy in the end and we decided to create

an antena at the top of the tower to achive the height to win the

compitition.

Sam Horwood

p h o t o g r a p h i c p r o c e s s

The Final Design

Sam Horwood

d e c o n s t r u c t i o n

Here we can see the collapsing point of the tower itself resting just where we place two beams to support the tower

Sam Horwood

b i b l i o g r a p h y

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ChIng, F. (2008) Building Construction Illustrated, 4th Edition. John

Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey