ENVD 4410 █ Spring 2004 █ Instructor Michael Jenson █ Urban Design Studio █ 16 weeks
(3) THREE – Use of Structural Steel Some of the benefits of steel materiality in commercial design are that it has a high resiliency and performance level under harsh natural conditions such as earthquakes and hurricanes. Secondly, it spans great distances while remaining slender and agile. Steel is superior to most or all structural materials simply because it can easily be modified for changing building requirements and almost all US steel is recycled, making it a very environmentally sound choice for construction. The undulating freeform canopy mentioned above made use of steel tube system engineering. The form itself is based loosely on a 3 dimensional sine curve. For this curve it was essential to construct an exterior mold that played well off the programmatic context and yet still had structural integrity. In my research of tube system engineering, the organic forms which it traditionally creates, are simplified with triangulated meshing. The tubes themselves have an extreme compression index and the weight to span ratio is very low.