Studio Journal - Week 1 (Vuk Milacic 640020)

We began the construction process by creating a solid, square-shaped base, which we reinforced with two additional inner walls.

As the structure began to ascend, we began to reduce the number of walls as we had already created a solid base of many vertical levels. As shown in the photo above, the thickness of the exterior walls gradually decreased as a structurally sound base was established.

As the structure began to rise, we chose to take on a more circular form in terms with the walls because of two reasons; firstly we were running out of blocks and would be unable to push vertical limits with a square-shaped form, and secondly, we thought that this would make the structure more stable as the corners of the building did not have such a load on them but rather the load was distributed amongst the whole span of the wall.

We continued the circular form all the way until the end of the construction process as it provided stability as well as surface area to continue building, although in the end, we could only stack 2-3 blocks per level as the building had become so narrow.Construction in this form allowed us to both expend material (blocks) as well as build a stable structure at altitude.

As we ran out of blocks, we were forced to begin removing them from the bottom of the structure, creating an Eiffel Tower-looking base in which 4 points supported pretty much the entire load of the structure. We created beams spanning from each of the 4 points to help transfer the load across a larger area

Overall we ended up creating the longest lasting as well as the tallest structure in the class, which we were ecstatic about because we had been trailing the other groups the entire session.

At right is our final product, as a reference, Jorge (with the cap and glasses), is 1.88m tall, so the height the structure reached was quite significant.