DALY MORENO II   Architecture, BIM Management

The final stage in a waste water treatment process is a reservoir where the water is chemically treated with chlorine and the clean water is released back into the natural water supply (a.k.a. the river). It turned out the capacity of this reservoir needed to be tripled to be proportional with the water treatment volume projected for this station.

This requirement made the last stage reservoir the largest building in the facility, with around 10m of height, 80m of length and 40m of width. In order to make it easier on the eye for the local community, the Water Utility Department at AECOM (WUD) asked us to design a façade for the reservoir.

The general form for the reservoir was mostly fixed, it had to have a given volume and the area reserved for the building in the site was narrow making the rectangular plan the only option. Since a straight lined building would be cheaper to build there was not much room for tapering or round walls either.

The design concept evolved from the need for a maintenance ramp to access the green roof. This ramp goes up around the reservoir "carving" its way through the  cantilevered part of the building façade. The upper part of the reservoir is cantilevered and finished with a textured cement plaster, a green stucco. The base/plinth of the reservoir is covered with a vertical garden supported by a grid of prefab concrete parts attached to the containing walls.

These different planes and finishes on the façade make the upper part of the building appear visually detached from the base, changing its proportion to make it look lighter, and the continuous gap produced by the ramp going around the building breaks the continuity of the solid walls, breaking the otherwise monolithic aspect of the reservoir.

My role in this project was to develop the architecture concept for the building, generate the renderings and hand over a BIM model with the architecture elements of the project in .ifc format to be coordinated with the other design disciplines by the BIM managing team.

I made this model using Rhino with the plug-ins Paneling Tools and VisualARQ, a 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.

Rendered with Lumion and finished with Photoshop.

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Design for Utility building and BIM : Daly Moreno

Renderings : Daly