Journal of Architectural Engineering

The relationship between the design quality and the design fee is directly dependent upon how the fee is determined, compared to the level of services to be provided. Design deficiency is an error or omission in the drawings and/or the specifications, which results in a facility that will not adequately perform its intended mission. This study is an attempt to determine a statistical model that relates the design fee and design deficiency. Such a model can be used to predict the level of design quality. Data regarding design fee and design deficiency were collected for sixty construction projects in Saudi Arabia. Although the data have a large variation, the developed model shows clearly the decrease of design deficiency as the design fee increases.

Sustainability of the building investment depends upon the technological capability of buildings to facilitate their upgrading of systems, to meet changing expectations of building users, and adequacy of financial return on investment to building owners. There is a need for the development of guidelines to be used by the building design team to ensure that the approach to design and construction will facilitate capability for replacement of systems. The focus of this paper is on the development of guidelines for design for replaceability of building envelope systems in tall buildings. Examples of failures and replacements of building envelope components in a variety of climatic zones are reviewed in Saudi Arabia, the United States, Singapore, and Australia. A summary of an international survey of architects and engineers in nine countries, namely, the United States, Japan, Canada, Australia, United Kingdom, Singapore, Spain, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait, on priorities in building envelope design, is presented in the form of guidelines.

Smoke generated by fire in a building is carried by the indoor air motion. Thermal forces such as buoyancy induced by the fire are key factors in determining the air movement. Scale modeling studies are useful in understanding the smoke movement pattern, but scaling parameters have to be selected carefully. Two sets of scaling parameters on temperature and air speed proposed in the literature were evaluated by Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). A room-corridor structure was considered and the CFD program TEAM was selected as the simulation tool. The package was used with significant modification. Effects of buoyancy on the turbulence model were included, and nonuniform distribution of buoyancy was allowed to affect both the mean flow and the fluctuating motions. Two-dimensional simulations were performed for having fast simulation results. Two sets of 18 room-corridor simulations were performed with different room sizes and thermal power of the fire. The predicted results are applied to criticize the two sets of scaling parameters.

Numerical studies on a recent large high-rise building fire in Hong Kong are reported. Preliminary studies suggested that a lift shaft under refurbishment with all of its doors removed was the key factor in the fire spreading. This point is investigated in this paper by simulating the fire environment using a fire-zone model and computational fluid dynamics (CFD). Different scenarios with a fire starting at the lift shaft and also starting at a higher level were considered. Five sets of zone-model simulations and three sets of CFD simulations were performed. The importance of providing a lift lobby was demonstrated. It is further confirmed that this lift shaft would create many problems. A lift shaft, even undergoing refurbishment, should not have its doors kept opened.

Although entirely different in appearance, both cathedral flying buttresses and Mayan inverted-V-shaped vault ceilings are essentially leaning structures. The present study, illustrated by simple static structural analyses, demonstrates how slight but fundamental differences in the empirical developments of the common concept of a masonry leaning structure led to the construction of magnificent cathedrals in the case of flying buttresses, but a very limited architecture in the case of Mayan vault ceilings. The present study quantifies flying-buttress limit analyses, and extends one analysis to Mayan vault ceilings. Calculated quantitative relationships strongly suggest that the Mayan builders learned to position transverse wood struts reinforcing their vault ceilings and to use long ceiling stones primarily in a combined effort to ensure that the postconstruction structural behavior of the finished ceiling did not result in ceiling stones falling out, as well as to facilitate construction procedures. This is in contrast with previous studies that indicated that the practices of wood-strut reinforcing and long ceiling stones were adopted only to facilitate corbelling construction procedures.

This technical note briefly reviews the problems that our firm, Johnson Engineering Associates (JEA), encountered with both design development and procurement procedures in the development of a small ambulatory surgical center associated with an existing orthopedic clinic in Laramie, Wyo. The project experienced hundreds of changes, some minor, and others of major scope. We were able to maintain successful control of the contract and construction, and delivered a completed facility within the contract period. Once the facility was occupied, we experienced heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) commissioning problems, complicated by the immediate and regular usage of the facility for surgical procedures. The levels of on-site support required of our firm, both during construction and for over a year after the owner occupied the facility, far exceeded the normal levels associated with commercial construction, or our expectations. Lessons learned by our firm and the owner are reviewed, with suggestions that may assist in the future in the design of similar facilities.