01_Yuan Li (Grace)

Week 1 Constructing Journal:

This week’s learning’s theme is “Compression” which is the “External force (stress) that tends to crush a material, squeezing its particles closer and shortening the dimension in the direction of its action.” (Business Dictionary, 2013) In the studio, we were given a box of brick woods, a couple of brick stones and some rubber bands to build up a tower as tall as possible in a solid condition.

In order to fit the elephant in the tower, we firstly built a rectangular base around it to ensure that there is enough space for it to stay in.

For our first attempt, we were not very satisfied with our work because the base was not big and wide enough to be able to hold a very tall and stable tower because wide base provides adequate stiffness and strength so we made some change.

Instead, we extended the length of the base and made the four corners with more stable cross-intersected squares.

For about 10 layers high, we added brick stones to compress the brick woods and force towards the footing, which made the building more solid and not easy to collapse. We also used rubber bands to tie the brick woods together to make a beam, which can help to resist maximum stresses that support the tower to be more balanced and steady.

After deconstructing the tower, the tower collapsed from the middle and from all above it fell off but the base was very solid, after many times of shaking, it still remains stable. The middle part collapsed was probably because there were too many layers with brick wood and the brick stone was not able to be heavy enough to compress the force towards the base which makes it easy to fall. Next time, we will try to add fewer layers with brick wood to test if it will be a steadier tower.

Reference: Business Dictionary, “Compression definition� http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/compression.html Date Assessed: 06/08/13

Yuan Li (587145)