Week 7 studio journal ‘Off campus’ site visit
In week 7, we had an off-campus site visit. We had visited apartments and they were still under construction. The development is between the Department of Human Services and Australand Citta. The site is about 2000 square meters, and is located at Rathdowne and Princess Street. It has five or six floors with 2 levels basement. The piles were used in the foundation system, they are around 12 meters in depth, the piles were put in first and pins were put between them in order to make the piles fixed. Some of the piles were designed to hold up the as the building goes up.
Some of the piles were damaged already, there are some rocks were designed to return the piles’ position. The building used precast panels and timber flooring. It had double corridors and smoke doors. With the foundation system, the holes were dug away the wires and cables. Another part of the visited site was not residential but aged cares area. The building was earthquake proof and had small risk of danger for life. This Aged Care Centre will also provide people religious food with 16 different categories. The site had a public park and there were two type of roof used: membrane and solar roofs. There were bedrooms, laundry rooms, kitchen, and nurse station and generator rooms. The beds were single. If people need help, for instance getting up at night, they people can press buzzers to call the nurse and talk to them.
The walls were concrete blocks.
using
reinforce
The photo above shows a suspended slab, there is a big span in this part which can pull the cable straight and the spans and columns were increased. Also there are some pipes which are used for hot water.
The walls and windows are design to prevent sound and noises from outside. Some of the poles used are covered by aluminium.
This part is used to help nurse to transfer people with mobility problems. With this, people can be easily transferred between their beds to the bathrooms. There are buzzers next to the toilet so that people can call the nurse if they need any help. This aged care centre can bring a lot of convenience for people living here and staff working there. It is multi leveled and a lot of materials used are essential for security and safety, for example the fire doors. With the residential area, this style of living makes the area like a community and people may become closer to each other. As population increase nowadays, this modern way of living will be adopted by even more people.