Building Conceptualization
January 14, 2009
The Odum School of Ecology’s Green Building Planning Committee has been hard at work revising sketches, finalizing ideas, and proceeding down the path of building conceptualization toward a complete design. The images and descriptions that follow are excerpts taken from the 75% completion design teleconference.
This image presents the Odum School of Ecology and its place in the South Campus Neighborhood.
Species space relationships are shown in a compressed building format, illustrating the integrated approach to learning the Odum School will employ.
A horizontal space relationship can be seen while still keeping in mind the types of vertical spatial orientations which are proposed.
First floor spatial relationships detailed and explained.
Second floor spatial relationships detailed and explained.
Third floor spatial relationships detailed and explained.
This glass separated cubicle meeting space design conveys the flexibility and open style in which the Odum School has been designed.
This combination study bar area and glass meeting office are spaces where students could study, meet and talk with professors.
An open lounge area allows students and professors a place to relax as well as openly and freely interact.
Student study carrel space.
Semi-private study area where open and free communication is still encouraged.
A student lounge of this design would provide student organizations a meeting space to casually discuss and plan upcoming events.
The Odum Building will be a facility constructed for education and research, as well as to be studied and researched. Built into the design is the idea of the 'living wall' or 'green scrim' where plants are the major decorating scheme on the exterior. These plants will serve many purposes including keeping the building's interior shaded and cool, essentially transforming the building into its own plant identification course, and by providing a natural habitat for local creatures, it will further blend the line between building and nature.
The Odum Building is designed to make maximum usage of natural lighting while minimizing thermal heating. Part of the energy production scheme is to install solar panels on the roof and side of the building to collect the sun's energy and satisfy at least a portion of the building's power needs.
Building construction illustrating use of natural ventilation for air circulation. Making use of the natural properties of air, the building can be naturally cooled in the summer by opening windows, allowing the hot air to escape and cooler air to be drawn in from the bottom floors.
Planned purification, recycling, and reuse of water in the Odum School can be seen from this architectural sketch.
The charettes, design meetings, planning, and conceptualizing are all finished. The final Odum School of Ecology Conceptual Plan will be presented by the architectural firm BNIM on Wednesday January 21, 2009 at 3:00 PM in the Ecology Building’s Auditorium. Anyone interested in the final book, or the design process is urged to attend.
As always, if you have any questions or comments, feel free to email me at jlmck10@uga.edu and I will try to get back to you as soon as possible. Hopefully, I will see all of you on January 21 at 3:00PM in the Ecology Auditorium.
Hi Jamie,
Like we discussed, I had questions about privacy in offices (what will interior walls look like?), and also how classrooms and the auditorium can be darkened enough to give presentations.
Overall, looks AMAZING! I am so excited about the prospect of this!
Anisa
First off, the design of the building looks beautiful. However, my questions and concerns are bias in nature to my role within Ecology. As the Systems Administrator, my priorities are focused on ensuring that adequate consideration is being made to appropriating space towards IT infrastructure/services. This includes forward-looking expansion possibilities.
When I look at this building conceptualization and see no reference to IT-specific space, I begin to worry that technology is being viewed as an afterthought to design. One such example is identifying space for high-density computing that will satisfy unique environmental requirements. More and more of our faculty are shifting their research to a computational base. In addition, general IT support must have a central physical space to provide services effectively(ie. data center/MDF). Now whether this space has been accounted for in “Administrative Space” or “Research Lab” space, I am unable to infer. The point being that no reference is made.
In summary, I’m trying to avoid issues that I see in our current building. I would be disappointed to walk into a building of the future to find IT equipment wedged into nooks and inadequately-sized closets, or faculty having to silo high density computing arrays in make-shift, energy-inefficient spaces. Even more worrisome to me personally is the possibility of having to host department-critical services on servers sitting in office corners.
Thank you for your time.
Jeremy Sanderlin