House Design Project
Our latest project is for dencity design in Atlanta, GA. It’s an interesting house with multiple cantilevers. Here is a rendering of the house:
Rendering of proposed house.
The items in red are the steel beams. Notice we have a cantilever deck on one side, and we are cantilevered over the garage. This is not an easy thing to design, the beam sizing is hard, the connections are hard, and so are the baseplates and foundations. To design this, we used Bentley RAM Elements. Here is the rendering from the software:
This is a rendering for the steel cantilever structure in our structural software.
In the analysis process, RAM Elements solved 132 equations. I could have designed this by hand, but figuring about 15 minutes per solved equation, it would take me 30 hours. Considering I tried numerous alternatives, triple that number, it would be more like 90 hours. Since you can’t just sit and solve equations day in and day out, humans did not evolve to do such things, we’re talking about month to do this design by hand. That’s for an experienced engineer. Of course the chance of error is extremely high in such a complex undertaking too – typically on projects this complex in the days before computers another engineer would have to be assigned just to go over the calcs done to make sure everything was done right.
This will be quite a house, we’re looking forward to seeing it constructed later this year.