Logbook - Week 1 - Putera

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Putera Perkasa Sinuraya

Studio Activity The class was instructed to form a group of four and given a task to form a tower made of bricks (it is made of compressed timber and the brick is shown as in figure 1). The tower must be as tall as possible and must be able to accommodate a dog-like action figure somewhere on that tower; the top, the bottom, wherever the group decides. At the very end, the group needs to remove to bricks gradually and determine the weakness of the tower.

Our group, firstly, decides the way the bricks should be arranged to form the tower starting from the base. We conclude that it is best to start with the brick system as depicted in figure 2. A system where each brick was located adjacent and on top of each other, while the side that had the largest surface area at the bottom; we called this position 1. The bricks were formed from the base as a semi-circular wall (figure 3) because we plan to accommodate the dog like statue inside the bottom of the semicircular tower. This will ensure the stability of the tower and that we have sufficient amount of bricks to reach the height of the ceiling, or so we thought.

As our tower grew taller, we realized that it was much more efficient to arrange the brick as illustrated in figure 4. This system, call it position 2, oriented the brick in such a way that each brick level is higher but with less surface area at the bottom. This new arrangement of brick started in the mid-level of the tower, forming a brick tower as depicted in figure 5.

The time has come to remove the bricks one by one in order to analyse its weakness. Firstly, we remove the bottom of the tower, arranged in position 1. To my surprise, even with the removal of some bricks on the base, the tower still stand firm. It is as if the removed bricks are frameworks. However, when we try to remove one of the brick arranged in position 2, all the brick on the level above the removed bricks falls apart. This implies that every level of the brick needs to have certain amount of surface area as the base in order to sustain the structure of tower even with the removal of a few bricks. Furthermore, this sad pattern of collapse repeats as I removed even more bricks from the first level of the brick tower, indicating that the brick tower need to have certain amount of mass below it to sustain its stance.

This studio activity, to sum up, taught the group important lessons about the system and stability of structure, a good opening activity for constructing environments.

Glossary Load Path: The Diagram of Forces indicating its transmission to the ground Masonry: Construction technique by placing mass material adjacent or on top another with mortar to stick them together Compression: A type of force that tends to compress or pressure a material inwards Point Load: A load concentrated on one particular point Reaction Force: A force created as a response to other loads, this reaction force is normal to the direction of the opposing force Beam: Horizontal element of a structure that involves in resisting load