- Placing Mechanical System on Top floor and Moving Air to Lower Floors

Hello, I'm Luis Ayala, I'm an architect. Design director here in the Houston office for Gensler. And today I want to show you a very cool project that we're competing; this is a design competition. This is for the new Administration Office of the Board of Corpus Christi. So when we were talking about this building being resilient, remember that we spoke about the first floor being sacrificial, so if there is a flood the first floor can go away but the second, third, fourth, and fifth continue to operate nonstop. For that reason, we decided to put all the mechanical systems on the fifth floor.

So all your air conditioner units are there, and your pumps that are moving water are also there. So how do you, from the fifth floor, from the roof, how do you get into every floor? In the core of our building, if you see these spaces here that have the cross, those are shafts where all the ducts with air are going down. So all the cold air is being produced here, and then moving down to the lower floors.

And let me show you, for instance, what happens on the fourth floor. You have that shaft coming here, and from there we will go into the spaces where areas need it. You're putting air into the building but you're also taking the return air, that air that has been used already inside. So there are two shafts for that reason; one is for the new air, and the other one is for the return. So the machines upstairs, they're taking that used air and filter it and making it cold again, taking the humidity out, and then pumping back to the building.

So that's how the mechanical system will work in that building.

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