Students:
Bennett Graham & Lawrence Smedley
Project Title:
”Waffle”
Course:
ARCH 40102: Integrated Design Studio
Instructor:
Nick Safley
Year Level:
Fourth Year
Project Description:
The project was a comprehensive and integrated design of a 100,000 SF High School in Miami Florida. Students were asked to develop a relationship between spatial, material, and systems configuration in relation to building figuration.
Waffle is a building in the design district of Miami which will house the DASH Academy, a magnet school for art and design. The new building sets as a thin bar along the one flat edge of the site to the east. For our structure we employed a majority steel system with a giant 36’ tall truss system running the full 270’ length of the building to allow for the cantilever as well as support and redistribute the loads from the floors above the gymnasium. This truss level allows for the double height nature of the gym and auditorium on either end, while also creating a mezzanine level in the middle which houses the majority of our mechanical and electrical systems. For our façade we decided to emulate the waffle slab concrete structure used in our lifted site, creating a grid of UHPC fins which project from and wrap around the building. These fins help further express the slenderness of the building, but we also angled them both vertically and horizontally in order to provide shading from the sun, especially on the western side.
