Residential Building Design

For a term-long Architectural Technology project, I collaborated with Architectural Engineering and Architectural Design students to design a multi-use residential building. The project included multiple in-person mark-up sessions with our professor, where we presented large printed designs and received detailed feedback for submission. This project taught us every step of residential building design, including creating the building from the ground up in Revit and integrating all mechanical systems.

Goal

The goal of the project was to develop a full permit application for a detailed, Part 3 code-compliant multi-use residential building. The building was located on a real plot in Ottawa and had to comply with all zoning bylaws. The design included a retail space on the first floor, 3–4 floors of residential space above, and underground parking. The project required fully detailed mechanical, lighting, and plumbing systems, as well as complete building envelope designs. All submissions were presented in a professional format, simulating a real permit application, and subjected to detailed mark-up sessions to refine the work.

Challenges

The main challenge with this project was figuring out how to tackle such a large and daunting project without much experience. We were able to overcome this by taking the project one step at a time and designing the building from the ground up. The course was also designed in a way to teach us a new component each week which we could then apply to the project so we didn't get overwhelmed or fall behind.

My Role

Work was distributed evenly among team members: each person was responsible for specific envelope designs, while other tasks were divided according to their size to ensure balanced workloads. My contributions included designing the Revit floor plans, completing my assigned plumbing design, developing my envelope detail, and assisting with formatting and detailing of the overall model.