Week 6: Erlanger House

Week 6

Thursday we went to the Erlanger House. It is an absolutely incredible structure, quite incognito and businessy-mysterious from the outside. I didn’t realize until after visiting the Erlanger House that our modeling project is actually supposed to be inspired by this home. It gave me a lot of valuable insight into the project, but it was also fun to see this week how some of my classmates have come up with different ideas for the model project that involve concepts extremely different from those seen in the Erlanger House. I think I’d like to live in this house. I could not stop taking pictures of it – such a unique, rare find is this building.

The entire thing is based on simplicity and openness. There is really only one big room, with other rooms flanking it, yet they allow for some openness and crossing among the rooms with ease. The continuum between the inside and outside is interesting, including coarse gravel inside and a pebble-filled cement floor. The boxy nature of everything in this house allows the space to seem much larger than it is. Also, the space is utilized with incredible efficiency. Every nook and cranny is a storage space. I really enjoy the symmetry of this house, but my favorite part is probably how the loft is constructed. There is a small bridge from the stairs into the bedroom, which is actually like a dream. I love the potential for danger that appears to exist in this construction. There is a gap between the glass courtyard wall and the lofted bedroom, creating the illusion of a floating floor.  I attached some photos of the most interesting parts of the home.

The piano is the main focus of the open dance room area, including a huge glass wall for openness.

The exterior is quite mysterious - and boring!

The floating bridge-walkway, my favorite part.

The chiney has the only angles in the entire house. It's pretty cool how central it is to the construction.

Week 5: Domes

Week 5

A tour of domes brought us to several different large buildings around campus. It was really quite exciting to talk about structural engineering. These topics greatly interest me, as a mechanically-focused engineer. Some topics I’ve learned about in TAM classes (especially solid mechanics) are buckling, twisting, and bending. This made a whole lot of sense in the context of TBH, which has huge I-beams supporting the entire building, periodically broken by horizontal supports. These horizontal supports prevent buckling. It’s really cool how the statics course I took has taught me about the distribution of forces through a truss. It helped me to better understand what was going on when we visited a lot of Domes on Tuesday.

First, we went to the football practice facility. It has an interesting dome which slopes downward from one end to the other. The massive concrete construction is covering a steel frame. Next, we went to Huff Hall. This building has a bunch of beams that at first appear to be curved, but are actually segmented and curve across the ceiling to distribute the forces to the alternating vertical beams on the sides of the building. Being an older building, it actually has a remarkably complex domed ceiling with an incredible branching framework. Then, we tried to use the secret passageway to get from Huff to the Armory, but unfortunately, the door was locked – see photo below. The Armory is a cooler dome, in my opinion. There’re two big sides that come together in a window running the length of the ceiling, supported by enormous pins. The pins are showcased by the skylights, a remarkable feat of engineering. I enjoyed this day a lot and learned about different types of domes.

Huff Hall has large columns supporting the complicated truss ceiling.

Pillars support the curved semi-cylindrical ceiling of Armory.

We were unable to pass under the street from Huff to Armory :(

Pin joints support the two sides of the Armory roof.

Week 4: TBH

Week 4

In exploring Temple Hoyne Buell Hall Tuesday, February 10, unfortunately we could not make it into the mechanical rooms since the locks were recently changed.  Still, Professor Hinders went ahead and showed us the overall ventilation infrastructure of the building. What’s great about TBH is that the entire building’s mechanical system is exposed. Actually, it’s put on display in a really cool way. Two huge ventilation pipes carry the cooled/heated air up to the top of the building – one to each side. The huge pipes slowly branch as they wind through the building. We ended up walking through the whole building, seeing how the pipes gradually shrink down in size through the studios and offices in order to force air out until they are very small on the first mezzanine level.  Professor Hinders showed us his office – which is barely tall enough for his tall stature. The cool thing is that he can actually open his ceiling vent to show the inside of the ventilation system.

There were many other things to appreciate about the building. I took some cool photos of the exterior, and enjoyed understanding how all the parts of the building work together in sweet unity. The paserelles cross from professor offices on one side of the building to graduate student studios on the other side, which is very symbolic. The interior materials of the building actually pass to the outside of the building in a flow which makes the building one with its environment. We also observed other parts of the infrastructure – different water flows and returning pipes. The entire system is extremely complicated, but well-designed to be exposed and shown off with the materials of the building. It was a fun tour and I learned a lot about how temperature-controlled air is transported around the building. The atrium has a set of vents at the bottom which allow for air to rise most of the way up the windows, too.

A panoramic shot of the exterior of TBH

What lovely reflection is the curved exterior of TBH where the pipes run along.

Week 3: Scavenger Hunt & Krannert

Tuesday, February 3

Here are the results of what Sam and I found on our scavenger hunt! It was quite fun. :)  Sorry we didn't hug the columns! We missed that part.

A: Tuscan columns at the Union
B: Doric columns at Lincoln Hall
C: Ionic columns at the Architecture Building
D: Corinthian columns at Busey Hall
E: Combined columns at the Halene Gateway


Thursday, February 5

On Thursday, we had a tour of Krannert Center for the Performing Arts. We went into all the different theaters that were open, and also got a tour of the underbelly of the center. It was incredibly cool to see how complicated the back-workings of the center are. The area of the center is 1.5 acres, which is equivalent to 9 tennis courts, making it the largest footprint of any low building on campus. It was nice to see the model (made by an Illinois architecture student) to understand the overall building - at least the visible parts of it. Most of the building is underground. My favorite part was the scene shop. It is actually built on a different foundation in order to prevent the vibrations and noise from affecting shows in the surrounding theaters.  One other cool thing is that Mr. Krannert patented corrugated cardboard. I can absolutely see how you would be extraordinarily successful given the patenting of such an incredibly useful invention. It was an interesting tour!