Constructing Environments Journal Week 1

The main activity of the tutorial was to build a tower from wooden blocks as high as we could and must have an opening to accommodate the toy dog that was given by our tutor. In a group of three we discussed that the forces are all acting down on the tower as the blocks compress . As a group we reflected on the Melbourne high rise buildings and thus initially chose a rectangular building over circular like other groups.

As we had learnt compressional forces delivered all forces to the ground, thus we decided on having few gaps between blocks and and had the walls two blocks thick to cater for the large weight we planned for it to support.

As the tower grew taller we leant that we were going to run out of blocks before a decent height could be reached. We decided to make the walls singular block and also started to space the blocks out further leaving gaps. This also allowed for less force per height to be absorbed by the base.

Having reached a certain height we ran out of blocks thus were forced to create arches in our tower to gain more blocks. This also allowed for the toy dog to be able to fit inside the tower.When creating the arches we resembled structures like the Eiffel tower that diverted all the forces to the corners of the tower. We were able to achieve this and keep the tower strong

The taller our tower got, the narrower it became as we continued trying to minimise the towers weight. As other groups towers fell, we made use of the blocks and continued to build ours up.

Our inability to keep the tower above a central point lead to swaying and unequal pressures applied to different parts of the tower. This ultimately lead to our tower collapsing approximately 10cm from the roof structure.