B4 - Group C - Cristian Almendariz

            I decided to link this class term project with senior design.  My senior design group is researching the development of an engineering project that will help Piura, Peru.  Figure 1, is Peru’s map showing the location of the city. There are more than 260,000 squatters in the city who live in inappropriate homes made of improper materials.  Most of these families live in overcrowded houses where more than 4 people live in a single room.  Most of these houses do not have basic services such as electricity, water, sewage and others.  Figure 2, is a photograph Santa Rosa Squatting family neighborhood we took in our visit to Piura.  Moreover, a high number of these houses are located in high flood risk zones that are highly vulnerable during el Niño.  For this reason, many families lose their homes during el Niño and are obligated to restart from zero.  For this reason, my senior design team is designing a sustainable housing complex with storm water management system located in a low risk-flooding zone.  The main goal of our project is to provide squatting families houses that will be able to withstand el Niño recurrence [1].

Figure 1 - Map of Peru and Piura

Figure 2 - Santa Rosa Neighborhood

I am in charged of the architectural design of the housing unit.  This is not an easy task because I have to make sure that this house is not too different from the locality houses architecture and be sure these families will like it.  We want families to be satisfied with this house and take care of it.  Originally, I was simply going to develop 2D AutoCAD floor plans and facades of the house.  This project is the perfect opportunity to link the “intelligent building” concept into our project by using a software (REVIT) that is based around this concept.   I would be developing a complete REVIT 3D model of the house.  REVIT will allow me to visualize better my house, make improvements to the floor plans, add furniture and appliances, and design the facades.  Additionally, I will possibly be able to select the types of materials I will be using for my house (e.g. type of floors and walls).

I have no experience with REVIT therefore; this project main challenge will be to learn how to use REVIT.  The REVIT assignment was an excellent opportunity to be introduced into the program and now I will be expanding this knowledge by making a more complex model.  I would have to learn how to create/modify components (e.g. doors, windows, bathrooms, counters, etc.) of my model to the way I need them to be.  Last week I was finally able to complete all the modifications into the 2D AutoCAD floor plans of the house, Figure 3 is a snapshot of the AutoCAD drawings.  This week I will start developing the floor plans in Revit.  I am highly motivated and enthusiastic to complete this project.

Figure 3 - AutoCAD 2D model of house

References

[1]  Cumpa, Dario. (2002). “Criterios para el planeamiento de la ciudad de Piura”.  Universidad de Piura, Piura, Peru.

[2] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Piura,+Peru/@-5.1930819,-80.7368474,12z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m2!3m1!1s0x904a107c793c39b7:0x1de8948d1c01fe28

Responses

William,

I find your ‘tiny houses’ topic really interesting.  I have to admit that I never heard about it before.  This is the type of housing that I see happening in a near future, especially in overcrowded cities.  I think that Tokyo is already suffering from overcrowding and people are now leaving in really small “apartments”.  Some of them are even smaller than a normal living rooms and the bed or bedroom is the size of a closet.  This new housing trend is definitely going to change society in many aspects.  I see it will have a major influence in marriage and family size decisions.  I believe people are going to consider to not get married, not have children, or have no more than one child.  I am definitely interested knowing the results of your investigation.  

Alexis,

I find your topic really interesting.  I can definitely see that daylight technologies have an immense future potential.  For my senior seminar I research sensing technologies for structural health monitoring.  My research showed that this sensing technology is extremely useful but it can be improved.  My question is: Do you know how advance this technology is?  I would like to incorporate these daylight technologies into my senior design.  Unfortunately, I am not able to do so because its high cost will compromise costs of my houses.