ouch!
It seems but it does not. You’ll need extremely better insurance for the glass panels.
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As you can see, it is not a single panel, the poles strengthen the lintel.
Well, such a location of the steel frame and its connection to the structure does not prove that its task was to protect the window panels. Hence my question.
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Yes, hurricane resistance is the driving factor in all this. The previous house on this lot was destroyed by “Superstorm Sandy.”
The floor structure is sufficient to clear span the space for gravity loading, but without a plywood sheathed wall at the end, nothing would keep it from folding over sideways with a lateral wind load parallel to the glass wall. The steel isn’t needed to hold the building up, but rather from deforming sideways like a parallelogram. That requires special moment connection joint details where the vertical and horizontal members join. The mullion stiffeners in the window wall likewise don’t hold the building up, but rather keep the windows from being pushed in by lateral wind loads perpendicular to the glass wall. A whole lot of stuff needs detailed thought. In other parts of the world, lateral loading means earthquake resistance which works differently, but around here it’s hurricane winds.
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Thanks
Looking at the structure my first gut feeling is that you can’t just open one end, the front, without some extra supporting frame. Wall frames plus trusses aren’t enough against wind load.
Not saying this out of disrespect, but the structure can be looked at as an open cardboard box. With significant wind (not even hurricanes) deformations in the front plane can easily be too much for the glass panels, causing them to leak or even break. The front windows and glass aren’t supposed to contribute restraining windload on the side. Hence a steel frame to which the front windows can be attached.
Box.skp (238.9 KB)
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The system should be viewed as a box open on one side. The red wall (floor) and the yellow wall as well as blue walls stabilize the structure. In order for the “glass wall” to be cut, it would have to force the fasteners of the second floor to be cut or the anchors of the right or left blue wall to be torn off. Without taking anything away
Nice application of SKTUP, and super drawings !
just for information:
in USA the information on windloading can be found (ref Structural analysis -R.C. Hibbeler) in the standard ASCE 7-05.
it gives the information on the reference windspeed to be used to calculate the pressure/suction on exterior walls and how they are distributed on the building.
In Europe we use the same approach, but the windloading is specified in a Eurocode standard.
The principles and the approach is similar; windloading is related to the square of the windspeed and increases with the (reference)height of the building.
An easy to use tool for rectulangular buildings can be found at the BBRI: Belgian Building Research Institute.
it is called Wind_Interactive:
although the windspeeds are lower than in USA, the tool can be used as follows:
-only the pressure coefficients on the walls and then multiplied with the standard windpressure at the reference speed in USA
-using the design values at eg windspeed of 26m/s but multiplying them with the squared ratio between (windspeed usa/26).
The output can be send to an XLS file; the tool needs Mathcad to be installed but it is straightforward.
The program download link (in French, but the tool is written in English):
Outil CSTC • Wind Interactive (WInt) • Calcul des pressions de vent
Success!
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It’s getting there. Kinda looks like the Medeek BIM SketchUp model, eh?
BTW, technical note on the photo: Nikon Z6, 14-30 f/4 at 14mm, hand held 5 exposure bracket set composited in Photomatix Pro 6, Interior 3 preset, and final editing in Lightroom including slight perspective “correction.”
@medeek, yes it went from open web trusses to I-Joists and that’s what they look like.
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Are the windows at the top of the side walls another change or just a temporary lack of wall sheathing?
Just temporary. That’s where the plywood joint fell. The next row of plywood will straddle the second floor framing rim.
I’d like to have that tailored for US building codes. For the most commonplace calculations of wall bracing to resist lateral loads, Simpson Strongtie provides this online calculator resource:
https://www2.strongtie.com/webapps/BracedWall/
This project, however, doesn’t really fit that mold.
Robert, Bravo for the ocean horizon/HDR-IBL issue! Your solution looks good.
I didn’t know about the 1/sqrt(2) thing.
That’s really cool.
Every day is a school day!
I like your match photo technique.
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That’s just the way my brain thinks about it given I was a physics major before I went to architecture school. It’s probably easier to pull a guide out from the wall, reference the end of the miter cut, then rotate the miter cut square to the wall, and scale it back to the guide thereby not doing any math.
I didn’t have to do this, but when a client found a vanity at a big box store, and I saw they actually had a decent cut sheet on it, I thought, “I could make that pretty easily.” Fun little exercise.
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Another try at a representation of my client’s product selection: Fair, but not great accuracy from a web photo and just over all dimensions.
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Rounding the final turn and heading for the finish line. So, what do you think folks? Kinda looks like the SketchUp model, no?
SU Model:
Progress Photo:
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Pretty spot on! Nice work!
The most shocking part for me however is that its allowed to be build so close to the waterfront. Where is that if you are able to share?
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At first glance I thought that the second image was a render!
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You need to have very sophisticated, AI-rendering software to mimic the mess that contractors produce on a site…
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