Improvements That concludes our report. We addressed a large number of different issues and designing an integral structural, taking all these different factors into account, is never easy. Here we suggest issues that we feel could or should have been addressed and that we would like to solve in a future step. The first and most obvious issue is the facade panel size and the number of portals required to keep the facade panels from breaking. We are unsure what the root cause is, considering our spans weren’t exceptionally long, but adding more portals means that we have to add a lot of material and maybe worse, the portals obstruct the view on the northern lights which is highly undesirable. ‘Fixing’ this however would mean that we would have to go back to the drawing table and redesign the entire structure from scratch.
There were two opportunities that we did not grasp because we ran out of time (due to being stuck for two weeks). The first is modelling and optimizing the structure using FEM software, which we attempted to do but could not go through with. The second is to take a closer look at climate. We really wanted to design a facade panel with a cavity, but with the extreme loads and deflections that we were facing we simply could not find a way to integrate the extra weight in the short amount of time that we had left.We were also keen on doing some climate simulations with Grasshopper but our priorities were elsewhere. These are likely other aspects to improve on as well, but we feel that these are the main ones that we would like to address in a future step.
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