Water Treatment Facility
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Abstract
Students in this studio were asked to design a Water Resource Experiment Station at a site on the bank of the Missouri River west of Linton and South of Bismarck, North Dakota. The students were given presentations by studio collaborators from the Biology Department and the Department of Civil Engineering concerning the use of constructed wetlands to clean waste water from the laboratory and rain water harvesting from the building’s exterior to add fresh water to the clean waste water for the use of the laboratory. Each design is approximately 20,000 square feet in area, has public parking and public toilets accessible from the exterior and is intended to be open to the public for their use after hours and on the weekends. What I initially liked about the site was all the beach wood along the coast of the Missouri River, and how the land accepted this alien object. My parti was a piece of wood. I looked into the structure of wood. It consisted of these driving elements. That is how I got the three planes of my building, and later developed the structure, skin, and circulation to be another driving element of three. The panels on the sides of my building act as sun shades for the west and north faces, and also collect water for the ponds.