Wednesday 18 July 2007

Mock-ups at the Philips High Tech Campus

I one of our project at the High Tech Campus in Holland we made an extensive use of mock-ups. The Philips High Tech Campus is situated near Eindhoven in the south of Holland. It is a campus like setting of several laboratories were companies and knowledge institutes combine their knowledge, experience and research facilities to develop generic technology.

We designed several building and one of them is the so called WDX building. One of the most difficult aspect was the façade of the laboratories. For these laboratories there were almost contradictory requirements. Daylight should be able to enter as much as possible but direct sunlight was not allowed. Because of the experiments taking place the maximum allowable temperature variation was 0.5 degrees Celsius. The requirements for the offices were only slightly different.









A facade system was developed were large sunscreen panels automatically cover the windows in case of direct sunlight. Because of the requirements we decided to build two mock-ups. These mock-ups were quite large and heavy and did cost around $ 18,000. For the client experimenting and testing are an integral part of product development so he readily agreed to build the mock ups.



From these mock-ups we learned a lot. Some elements were modified in the mock-up itself while other elements, like the shape of the louvers of the sunscreen panels and the glass panels were modified and tested in additional models. The contractor wanted to be sure that all the requirement were met so he build a prototype that was attached to the actual building frame.
After the completion of the building it was calculated that the cost of the two mock-ups was less than 0.5 % op the total building costs. Correcting the mistakes that would have occurred in case the mock-ups would not have been build would be somewhere between 5 and 10 % of the building costs. So concerning mock-ups our conclusion was:

It pays to build mock-ups !

1 comment:

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