School of Architecture, Building & Design(SABD) Student Society: Breathless Enthusiasm on Building Construction

Before the Chinese New Year as we, architect students of semester 2, are noisily fooling around the class waiting for our Building Construction 1 lecturer, Miss Suja, to enter the class. But what we are not expecting is that day Miss Suja is actually going to give us a extreme stressful and difficult task to fulfill the requirement for our subject. With a great big smile, she loudly announced that we should make a model of an already existing building. Our model must be built out of 20 x 10 x 9 mm MDF blocks.

As first we were surprised – I mean how are we going to build a model of a whole building with just small wooden blocks? It’s just too absurd! After a clear explanation and briefing from Miss Suja, we felt relieve because we can take a part of the building and make a model out of it.

We felt anxious because this is different from all those assignments we had done before in our course. Without a moment of hesitation, almost everyone in the class proceed to come out with an idea on what sort of building they should use and how they can construct it in an efficient and time-saving way.

The main reason why we should do this assignment is to demonstrate a convincing understand of how solid construction works, to exploit the qualities inherent In solid construction and also to be able to manipulate solid construction to solve an oblique design problem.

After deciding on a particular building, we immediately went and look for second-hand wooden bricks because it will reduce our cost a lot from purchasing these materials. To construct the model, it is common sense to purchase tools such as saw, hammer etc to make our work of progress more efficient. Some groups even bought a drill to drill holes through the bricks so they can put steel wires through it to use it as a reinforcement bar. The only thing we did not expect is most of the groups, including mine, actually do not have enough bricks and white tack to build our model when it’s near completion!

After the completion of the model, we are require to produce a portfolio and present our model to the whole class.

The pictures below are some of the models constructed by us.