Partridge Partners News
Sculpture by the Sea
The office headed out for our annual 'Sculpture by the Sea' excursion in October. Partridge Partners is heavily involved with the exhibition every year, providing engineering advice and certification to those sculptures where gravity and loads need some expert input.
The 2008 Sculpture by the Sea was particularly special for the office, as one of our own was selected as an exhibitor! Mike Lipman, our senior project manager, turned his hand to sculpture and his piece, Interface, was the centrepoint of the exhibition items dotted around Marks Park.
Partridge Partners enters the third dimension
One of the great difficulties for many in the construction industry is the fact that our three dimensional world must be drawn in just two dimensions. Drawings prepared for Council submissions typically involve plans, elevations, and sections, all resolved into 2D depictions. When it comes to the engineering, the complex connections and details where beams, columns, and bracing members all intersect from converging angles have often been troublesome to represent clearly in the 2D realm. And spare a thought for the builder who must collect all these 2D snippets and construct the 3D structure.
Architects have had the luxury of 3D CAD packages for some time, allowing clients and home owners to better understand how the proposed design will eventually look. However, the engineering industry – or the software industry that supports it – has been slower off the mark. However, we like to think we’re ahead of the pack, and Partridge Partners has recently invested in the new Revit 3D software package for engineers. Many of our more complex structures and the elements that frame them can now be drawn and modelled in 3D. Not only does this tremendously assist the builder, but our steel member drawings can now marry with the steel shop drawings and production software for simpler and faster fabrication. Below is our 3D model for a multi-storey development we recently completed in Tamarama.
Gone with the wind
It may not be obvious to many, but wind is often the governing and critical force that determines the design and size of many structural elements in a building. Even the size of the timber rafters in the roof of a domestic house will more likely be determined by wind loads rather than the weight of the tiles and ceilings attached.
Partridge Partners gets involved with many projects where standard wind loading tables and analyses can result in conservative and over-sized structures. Wind is a dynamic and turbulent force, and the Australian wind and design codes do not always best predict or model realistic behaviour and forces. In these instances, more accurate loading and structural behaviour can be determined with wind tunnel testing.
Partridge Partners is closely associated with the independent wind tunnel installation at St. Peters run by Dr Graeme Wood and the team at CPP. A recent site visit gave our staff the opportunity to stand in the wind tunnel and subject ourselves to a 14 m/s wind. This is merely a fraction of the wind speeds that domestic houses in Sydney must be designed to - yet the forces were nearly impossible to stand up against. Below is the calm before the storm, followed by three staff fighting the wind….
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