Highrise and Sustainability Conference, UTM KL 20/10/2010

Concluding the highrise conference of the day and what i have learnt:

Speaker 1:  Ar Hijjas Kasturi
Highrise and Sustainability

To gain sustainability, carbon emission is to be reduced. The world's developement is contributing 33-38% of carbon emission.  However, there's no exact way of doing so, but the established guidelines serves as a beginning to help in reducing. 

When mentioning about sustainability, what is it actually? is it about water and energy efficiency?
No, it is more than that.  We need to look into the materials and construction industry etc to reduce the impact to the environment, and that would be where technology comes in. 

The sustainability could be done through the aspects of  the usage, method, type, transportation, disposal, and construction method of the materials.  For example, using recycle papers as formwork instead of topical plywood would be a practise in the past. 

The other technology introduced would be the bubble deck, which reduce the amount of concrete used and saving material up to 50% by using plastic balls.  Another would be the air purification by using  photocatalytic pavement blocks which absorbs water with special concrete pavement blocks.  The water harvest system and heavy glazing windows are introduced too, not forgetting the raised floor system for the inverter air-conditioning system/cold generation. 

He strongly urged us to lobby politicians and policy makers.

When asking about his opinion on the 100 storey highrise proposed by our beloved prime minister, he voiced our that it is merely an ego trademark, obviously, and that proposal is unsustainable at all.  He reasoned that with the same amount of money can build 30 buildings of 30 storey highrise. 
Highrise with its vertical transportation means would be wasting even more electric and time etc. 


Speaker 2:  Assoc. Prof. Dr. Faridah Shafii
The Sustainability of Tall Buildings:  A bird's Eye View

Face the inconvenient truth where there's a major increased in energy price and security, she highlighted three pillars to tackle the sustainable issues: environment, economy and social.  Highrises would means only high energy consuption for highrise's elevators and water pumping. 

The guidelines used are mainly to grade buildings initial planning idea, not for after construction purposes.  That would be a bit different from my previous understandings. 

Speaker 3:  Prof. Dr. Azlan Adnan
Earthquake Effect and Highrise Building Design in Malaysia

Very engineering speech. Not really interested.  For more info please google.

Speaker 4:  Miss Lillian Tay (Principal, chief deisgn officer of Veritas Architects)
A Sustainable Approach for Design and Our City

The presentation was done by showing the ongoing Veritas projects.  Here i would highlight some of it that creates impacts to me. 
One central: linkage towards the KLCC. To her, sustainability is about bringing the development into the neighbourhood.  Creating building envelope would be equally important.  She demonsrates the way they manipulate the design of portable photovoltaic panels and how they create natural ventilated but protected + heat buffer green space.  With protected atrium, it would also sufficiently sheltered from the rain and sun. 

Most of the projects used CFD stimulation by the engineers to understand the solar/wind influence on the building. 

There's also a project alike rifle range, penang.  The approach they use is to reclaim common spaces by clear the courtyard.  They also create entrance into the building by taking away a ground floor unit, which is a wow to me.  She also emphasis on the importance to maintain the sense of ownership and sense of identity.  For the project, they introduce a diy rainhood system to settle the water dripping problems. 

"To build a highrise only take three or four years, but to build a community takes much more than that.  "~~~Lilian Tay

5th speaker Mrs Saleha Yusoff
Highrise Demand in Malaysia
It's about calculation of housing/condo to know the demand or things like that.  I lose my concentration.  sorry for that.

6th speaker Prof Dr Mohd Hamdan Ahmad
Ideas from Studio

This is yet another interesting sharing of insight.  He pointed out how students always get lost in the design route, forgetting the initial intention/big idea.  By showing some of the senior's work, we get to understand more of the sustainability approach lays within.  Sam's boards are shown. hahaha!

Happy reading.  Cheers!

Transformation

1st year 4th project: Transformation

The project is about the manner of arranging and coordinating the compositions.

I introduce the transformation of stack up, collapsible, transformation and interlocking all in 1 3x3 cubes. Only one side of each cube are attached to the other.

And that, all the 100 over possibilities of placements are discovered through dissemble and assemble the blocks.

Linear, spatial, centralized, clustered and grid, all are made possible here.
It's a permutation of placement. =)

COMPLICATED IS SIMPLE, SIMPLE IS COMPLICATED.

First mocking model


Second mocking model


Submission model

Plane

1st year 1st semester third project...
Derived from the relief project, this plane project are to transform the 2D into 3D.

With that, i create a theme-park-thrilling plane layout.

Plan view

Rear elevation

Right elevation

Small triangles

Gateway

Wrapping of ropes

Relief ----- Growth

2nd project of the semester..
Growth as the theme, i define it as the advance of universe. Repetiitons of squares underlines the shape of a sphere, stackin at different height to symbolise different growth rate ,creating interesting shadow manipulation.

Inorganic arrangement of squares shows movements of particles around orbit.
Strips of triangular lines arranged in such that as if there were lines emerging from afar. Self rotating movements are portrayed.

Final touch up by adding stars to provide spacious illusion. =)

Lines

Reloading back the projects that i have done in my first years... Everything was done by cutting and pasting papers~~~ Starting from lines composition.

Projecting five bold and organic lines from a perspective point, and link them by lots more of organic thin lines.. Black and white portrays maximum contrast.

Derive from the black and white lines, the lines are further arranged, turns, twists and cross-cutting. Blue and green for harmonious flow.

Detail up, imagine glare of lights on the lines..

And the background, arrangement of lines varies to creat 3D-view.

(p.s. All the drawings are done in A2 size.. very very big to me by that time..)

Overall, i quite like the outcome of the project, though i still remember how lost i am by then, wondering how this is gonna relate to architecture. haha~

The Journey of Architecture

After years of exploring, learning and experimenting architecture, at times my mind was just jam packed with idea and I find it hard to organize every single one of them and eventually it just slipped away.

Hence, the blog here plays its crucial role. It serves as a journal, documenting the thinking, ideas, comments, and projects, capture and finally, transforms my thoughts into words and visible models.

As time goes by, i can refer to this blog as a form of reference as well as to evaluate my maturity through my journey in architecture. On top of that, i hope that the knowledge and idea that I acquire might inspire others in critical thinking too.


The journey of architecture is still a very long way to pursuit. There are always ample room for improvements The destination is not important, but will want to enjoy the miles to the fullest. Indeed, architecture will not extinct.

All the best to me!!!

I'm Poh Xin Yi, the Zenith archiloony.