DALY MORENO II   Architecture, BIM Management

A waste water treatment station is to be located near existing residential areas at Shek Wu Hui, a district at the North of Hong Kong, close to the border with ShenZhen. 

A community centre (the round building at the right of the image above) was added to the program to make to project easier to be engaged by the local community. The other utility buildings at the facility were also to be treated as part of a cohesive design

The community centre has a circular version (more iconic, see below) and another one with an orthogonal shape in plan (cheaper to build also shown below). Both building versions have a a belvedere at the top and are covered by a green roof / ramp going down through the length of the building until ground level.

The building heights in the complex range from  8 to 10m  for the higher buildings (lifting stations, separation process filters and fermentation towers), and the rest of them lower, 3 to 6m high (pumping stations, primary settling basins and bio-reactors). 

The intention of the architectural design was to soften the appearance of the utility buildings using round corners and warm coloured tiles so they would not look like boxy, straight lined shed typically used in industrial facilities. Building heights vary a lot, the tanks are semi buried and emerge only 1.5 to 3m above ground and the membrane treatment building is 20m tall. Average height is around 8 to 10m

We proposed to cover the low height tanks using a tensile structure using the the concrete dividers of the tanks as support. These round shaped tents follow the forms of the tank dividers underneath them. Their undulating surface has a fluid look that resembles soft hills,  nothing like the usual slabs on conventional settling basins.

The covering textiles are printed with a pattern we have developed specifically for this project. Its purpose is to have an effect of a camouflage that actually does not make the tanks harder to see, as would be the case in a military application, but make they look like something else, maybe like colourful meadows on soft hills ?

The design concept for complex as a whole and the community centre was directed by DM2 while I developed the architecture concept for the utility buildings plus a 3D/BIM model for the facility. Modelling was done in Rhino, Grasshopper and the VisualARQ plug-in (*)

Rendered with Maxwell and finished with Photoshop.

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(*)  BIM software for Rhinoceros that adds architectural features and parametric architectural objects that are suitable for 3D modeling, BIM model export (.ifc format) and extraction of 2D documentation)

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Engineering: Water Utility Department at AECOM-HK (WUD)

Design for Utility buildings and BIM : Daly Moreno and Leis Ho

Renderings : Ken Chen