Appetite for destruction

A roof made of pop bottles (Architecture students L-R: Ashlee Layton, Mark Whalen, Beth MacLeod, Steffan Gingras, Jennifer Stonehouse) (Danny Abriel photo)

Nothing keeps Dal students busy quite like a major problem hanging over their heads.

The occasion: the School of Architecture’s annual Structural Bay Week, held at Dalhousie’s Ralph M. Medjuck Building from June 21-25.

Fourth-year students in the Bachelor of Environmental Design Studies (BEDS) program were issued a challenge at 1/5 scale: Design and build a smaller section (or bay) of a roof structure that could be repeated to cover an entire building.

“Primarily we’re interested in the design process, but also the performance of the structures,” said Roland Hudson, assistant professor with the School of Architecture.

Each design was judged in terms of cost, weight of the structure and total load carried. A mark was also assigned for structural elegance.

“They learn a lot from playing with the materials, not just seeing it in theory on the screen," said Paul Shepherd of the University of Bath in the UK. Dr. Shepherd was invited by Dr. Hudson to act as guest judge and lecturer for the week. 

“By physically modeling these forms, there’s an understanding of how the structure performs that can become more understandable through seeing and feeling how it behaves and how it fails,” Dr. Hudson added.

And failure was the aim of the exercise; the scale models were each loaded with weights until they collapsed. This destruction is a valuable part of the learning process for students in the School of Architecture.

Many different approaches were used during the two days of design and two days of construction, which culminated in test day on the school’s front lawn.

“A lot of the groups ended up doing arches and we ended up trying to do beams,” said student Maribeth McCarvill. “We did a bamboo beam with a tension cable,” added teammate Panout Chulkaratana.

One team used empty two liter pop bottles to build an arch. The cost was low since the bottles were borrowed from a recycler, but the receptacles had an unexpected advantage. “The sun helps heat up the air in the bottles and it’s surprisingly noticeable how much it plumps them up,” noted Mark Whalen, part of the pop bottle team.

Another team tackled the matter from a different angle. “We started by wanting to make an arch…it was also driven by materials because we got all these tubes from the Chronicle Herald for free,” said student Naryn Davar. He was pleased with the pattern of triangular holes pierced in the structure intended to reduce overall weight.

In the end it was a very lightweight and cost-efficient structure that won. Though it held only a fraction of the weight other designs carried before failure, its minimal use of materials and elegant quality added up to a winning score.

Though Structural Bay Week has wrapped up, there is no summer vacation for the fourth-year BEDS students yet. Next, they finish up class work before starting free labs – more design and build projects that are sure to keep the challenges coming.