Boat House

This weekend, I decided to travel home for break as NDSU is giving us Veteran’s Day off on Monday. Because of this, I have been enjoying my parents’ company and a few delicious home cooked meals as well. However, with all the nostalgia of being home, a different kind of nostalgia has also hit me. As all of my previous studio models are on display in the basement, seeing them threw me back to when I was working on them. For this week’s blog, I decided to take a look back at one of my favorite projects yet and talk about what’s in store for its future.

Around this time last fall, my fellow second years and I were hard at work conceptualizing the project that would become known as the boat house. Each of us was working on our own to create a design that was to be located in Jamestown, ND and act as the Rowing Club for the Jamestown rowing team. The space would consist of a training gym, locker rooms, offices, bathrooms, a multi-use space, a boat repair space, and finally a boat storage hall. As the regulations basically stopped at that, we had almost free range over what we wanted to do. There were some square footage limits but those were also quite loosely defined.

The north face of the Final model as I photograph it in studio

As the this was to become the final project of the semester and our last studio assignment to be done by hand with no digital assistance, I really wanted to go all out on the design of it and challenge my drafting abilities. The inspiration I took for the project came from the very water it was to border. In my case, I actually designed the building to sit upon the water and an arm reaching out into the river. When it came to the form of the arm, I added a second adjacent arm that stayed on the shore and straddled a small harbor the boats would pull up to in order to dock. The form of the arms themselves were clad in a curtain wall on the south side and a solid concrete wall with a form mimicking water on the north side. With that, my project had been thought out to its completion and the model was constructed, the boards were made, the presentation was presented, and then the drawings were rolled up, the model was put on a shelf and that page of my college portfolio was turned over… Or so I thought.

Me with my final model and boards on presentation day

This semester, in my Environmental Control Systems: Passive Principles class, for our final project, we are assigned to take a previous studio projects and redesign it. This Design Simulation must include at least one aspect of every unit we have covered in that class in order to make it more passively environmentally conscious. For me, as I was quite proud of my boat house, I decided to select that project and bring it to the next level. I have already started calculating the volume of the thermal mass that the floor slabs need to be and working on how to better insulate the curtain wall. It is a tricky task and requires extreme thought and consideration to properly integrate all of the different systems we learned in class.

The final physical model compared to the still in progress digital model

Seeing as I am not completed with the project just yet, I still have much to do, but I am excited to take on this challenge nonetheless. It’s an exciting process to take a project you previously considered complete and question every bit of it. It may not be fun to tear apart something that you worked so hard on but it also becomes a learning lesson on how to better design your structures and to take advantage of what the natural environment already provides.