Engineering Drawing Final Project

~ Mushroom House ~

The goal of this project was to design and model a house in Revit and create construction documents for the house, over a period of about four weeks. Beyond square footage limits (3500), no other restrictions were given.

Case Study: House N-DP by GRAUX & BAEYENS Architecten

Before starting our own house, each student examined a house with architecture that they found interesting, focusing on design choices like utility and space enhancement, form and function, site planning, and landscape detailing.

I chose the House N-DP, an almost fully concrete construction by a canal in Belgium, because I found the small footprint and angular balconies intriguing. In the end, though, this study led me to choose a circular shape for my house because the sharp structure of this house felt stiff and unwelcoming.

Location:

We were allowed to place our house in any location in the universe. I wanted my house to be somewhere close to nature, so I chose Rocky Mountain National Park, next to Tonahutu Creek.

Planning:

To plan the design of my house, I completed three exercises. First was thumbnail sketches, which helped me come up with many ideas in a short span of time. Next, for the bubble diagrams, I sketched out vague room layouts for each floor of my house. Lastly, two concept sketches allowed me to add details to my idea.

Thumbnail Sketches:

My first idea was to make a tree as the first floor that branched out into three parts which would be three different rooms on the second floor. As I sketched this out, my drawings reminded me of mushrooms, so I used that idea to come up with my final thumbnail sketch of three "mushrooms" of different heights, with large roofs and two floors (shown on the right).

Bubble Diagrams:

My focus for these sketches was to take note of where I wanted there to be access to the outdoors and how I wanted the rooms to flow into one another. Specifically, I wanted the living room, dining room, and kitchen to all be open to each other and have either lots of windows or direct access to outside.

The top image shows the main floor diagram, and the bottom image shows the top floor diagram

Concept Sketches:

These sketches allowed me to plan out the east and west sides of my house. I focused on the balcony, roofs, and drainage system. I planned to handle rainwater with a series of small platforms on the outer walls to mimic growths on mushrooms, but didn't end up including this in my final design due to time and ability constraints.

The top image shows the east side of the house, and the bottom image shows the west side of the house

Design Process:

Main Floor Plan:

The main floor was built from three main overlapping circles, with the largest as the dining room/bedroom/bathroom, the second largest holding the kitchen and stairs, and the smallest containing the entryway and living room. The garage adds a fourth, smaller circle that is connected from the kitchen. The main rooms are connected through archways, and closets are positioned to use up small, awkward areas with sharp corners in order to leave main rooms with as many flat walls as possible.

Upper Floor Plan:

The upper floor only involves two of the main circles, with an arc coming off of the two circles that forms a hallway, and a second arc that forms the balcony. The upper circle that contains the staircase is open to the kitchen below, while the largest main circle holds the master bedroom, bathroom, and closet. Later on, the laundry room was added to this floor, with an entrance from the hallway.

Section Perspective:

Shown at the left is an image that cuts through a portion of the house, showing part of the living room, most of the dining room, and the kitchen on the main floor. It also shows the stairs leading up to the hallway, balcony doors, and master bedroom. The master bathroom is also visible on the top floor.

Design in Progress:

These images show the walls, rooms, and doors of the house. This is not the final configuration of the rooms, but it shows how the two floors stack on top of each other and how the rooms connect to each other.

Final Design and Plans:

The final design is a 2-story house with three overlapping circular sections. It has 2 bedrooms, 2 1/2 bathrooms, a kitchen and pantry, mudroom, dining room, living room, garage, and mechanical room. The upstairs area connects to a balcony supported by the garage, and both the kitchen and dining rooms exit onto circular patio areas.

West side of the house, with garage and balcony

Kitchen and second floor landing viewed from above

East side of the house, with two patios

Dining room viewed from the kitchen

Enscape_2021-04-24-16-44-59.mp4

Flythrough Video

Using Enscape, I created a video of the rooms in the house to show how the rooms transitioned into each other and how the outside looked from different angles. Enscape also allowed me to make the final clean images of my final design.

Final Construction Documentation:

210501-Final Project-Aspen-Kimlicko.pdf

The construction documentation was the deliverable for this assignment. The idea was to create documents that would allow contractors to build the house from the plans, although these plans lack sufficient detail and structural elements for the house to be successfully built in real life. The plans include site, foundation, and area plans, section perspectives and elevations, floor, roof, and reflected ceiling plans, and details of a typical wall section and balcony attachment.

The floor plans include dimensions for wall changes, windows and doors, and overall lengths. For this house, many of the dimensions involved arclengths, radii, and degree measurements to account for the circular shape.

Creating these documents from a template involved altering the title blocks and schedules, and creating an imaginary architectural design company.

Closing Notes:

This project was both really fun and really frustrating. I enjoy creating main structures of projects but often struggle with finer detailing, and so the beginning of this project was easier and more enjoyable than the latter half. I went over the size restrictions for the assignment and had to spend a lot of time manually resizing all my rooms and reshaping closets to account for the changes.

Overall, there are a lot of issues with my design, which is understandable since I've never designed a house before and wasn't given much instruction from my professors. The circular shape of my house made this project especially difficult for me because the program I used didn't work very well with arcs and rounded walls.

Despite this, I have created something I am proud of. I put a lot of time into it and now have greatly improved my large-scale 3D modeling and problem-solving skills. In the future I may use what I've learned over the course of this project to help me design a tiny house for myself that I hope to build someday.

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