Campustown Apartments
This project was a design for apartments and shops in the "campustown" area of Ames, Iowa. It was an entry in a student design competition sponsored by a brick manufacturer. Each entrant in the competition was allowed to choose a program and site. I selected a site across the street from campus, one of the most heavily used business areas in the city, but full of aging, often cheaply constructed, low-rise buildings. The site was surrounded by a number of other brick buildings (inlcuding the large dormitory modelled in grey in the topmost image), so I felt that a brick building housing shopping and apartments would fit well in the context, both aesthetically and fiscally.
Competition rules specified load-bearing brick construction as the primary building material, with an additional stipulation requiring at least one special brick shape. My design called for the building to be constructed from pre-laid brick panels, hoisted into place by crane. These panels would then be connected to other wall panels at the pilasters, using concrete poured at the site, as shown in the details below.
Presentation perspectives for this project were produced using the Movie.BYU 3D modeller. The color image at the top of the page was photographed off the screen of a Silicon Graphics Iris computer; the black-and-white perspective image is a plot from a flatbed pen plotter. The design was developed using AutoCAD, running on a variety of Intel-based machines.
More information:
Last update: June 7, 2005
Scott Johnson (sven@umich.edu)