Week One: Introduction
In the first week of semester we were required to build a tower as high as we possibly can using the amount of materials that were provided. The tower had to be able to accomodate something(small opening needed to be included) and incorporate ideas from this week’s subject content.
We didnt skecth our design beforehand and so just started building our tower from the knowledge of the most common bond in brick structures, known as stretcher.
At this stage of construction our group realised that one side of the tower had lesser brick layers then the other.
We had to reverse the process and build one more layer of supporting wall structure.
Even though heavy bricks held the structure intact, they were too short to build an arch.
Meanwhile the structure wasn’t strong enough to hold the bricks from falling apart. It collapsed on the left hand side, before we could strenghen it with some heavy mud bricks.
In order to solve the problem of short bricks, we put together small timber bricks. We bounded them with an elastic to make the bridge more stable.
Stretcher bond let us build a supporting wall on which we then would construct an arch to accomodate the dinosaur.
At this stage we turned the bricks 90 degrees and continued the bond in the perpendicular direction. This would allow to build inwards and close the opening,
We put two bounded by elastic bricks, in order to add width to our tower. It would add stability to it.
Apart from the base tower, we started making the top of it separately. This shows the concept of “In situ” and “Precast” constructions.
We put more heavy bricks on the sides of the tower to stabilize it even more.
And when the base was done
And started to gradually build our tower. Agian, using the stretcher bond within the bricks.
We put the precast construction on top. This prevented our construction from collapsing in the process of building and made the process more controlled and stable.
Our tower was the tallest in tutorial group. With this activity and our design, it was evident that precast constructions do save time when building. Also the outcome is more predictable and controllable. Because if one of our top parts was to break prior to installation- it wouldnt affect the tower and we could have just done the broken piece all over again without the fear of our tower collapsing