Abstract
Codes and standards are the bylaws that govern civil engineering design; they determine the legality of a given structure, and are themselves designed according to the unique requirements of a location. In the United States, codes and standards are developed according to environmental stressors: a building in Maine must tolerate a much greater roof snow load than a building in Arizona, for instance. My technical project, the design of a laboratory building at the University of Maryland, relies on these standards to design its foundation system and determine the resultant cost of the building. Conversely, my STS research considers the case of southern Africa, in which many countries inherit their design standards from former colonizers, leading to ineffective design. Both projects are described by the problem of analytical complexity in the built environment: the difficulty of applying existing standards in unconventional environmental conditions, as well as the inadequacy of some existing standards.
The E.A. Fernandez IDEA Factory is a planned building at the University of Maryland that contains meeting rooms, a café, as well as laboratory space, and is intended to serve as the regional center for quantum mechanical and robotic research. Our role was to design and plan a number of the building’s systems, including the substructure. The primary issue facing the building’s design is the local geotechnical conditions: the soil has a particularly high water table, which presents challenges in mechanical aspects of the design as well as in dewatering. Many buildings in the area simply forwent basements to account for this condition, entailing a lower space economy and consequential lower operational efficiency. While we were able to address the challenges presented by the site’s unique circumstances because of the overarching shape of American standards, there was significant analytical challenge in doing so, exceeding that of projects with more typical conditions. The problem overall is important as it provides precedent for civil engineering design in similar geotechnical conditions, and serves as the underlying foundation for a key development for quantum research in the D.C. Metropolitan area.
Southern African nations largely do not have their own structural design standards, instead utilizing the standards of their former European colonizers. My research analyzed a number of engineering projects directly, as well as higher-level academic opinion of the social systems in place ultimately responsible for the built environment. The primary issue of the existing design system is that these nations are largely unaccounted for in the standards they utilize: the environmental conditions of Zimbabwe are vastly different to those of the United Kingdom, and are not necessarily included in the United Kingdom’s standards. This results in the premature failure of structures across the region, which is not only uneconomical, but directly places the public at physical risk. The importance of this issue is clear: public safety is diminished by the existing standards in use in southern African nations.
The largest limitation in the design of the UMD IDEA Factory foundation system was the limited information set describing geotechnical conditions. As they measure the local environmental conditions, geotechnical engineering is a fundamentally stochastic process; engineers cannot describe completely properties of undisturbed soil at every point on a site. However, the potential consequences of this limitation are assuaged by American design standards, which take the incompleteness of the data set into account. Further development on this topic would be the long-term analysis of similar design solutions in challenging geotechnical conditions: while existing standards typically coincide with long-term performance, unprecedented design often does not conform to expectations. In a similar vein, the largest limitation of my STS research is the lack of available data on southern African design and infrastructure performance. Due to the relatively undeveloped research institutions in the region, there are few sources analyzing the state of infrastructure, and even fewer sources appraising design processes. Future research on the topic could include direct analysis of existing civil structures in southern Africa, as well as the design processes responsible for their creation. Furthermore, potential solutions to the issues facing the region can be developed: a localized structural standard set may be an avenue for improvement.
I would like to thank Caitlin Wylie for guiding me through the completion of this thesis portfolio, as well as Mohamed Ismail for the inspiration for my STS research. On the technical side, I’d like to thank Diana Duran for guidance in my capstone project.
