Introduction



The purpose of this thesis project is to analyze and improve upon the design of an existing building. 750 East Pratt Office Tower, located in downtown Baltimore, MD, was chosen as the subject of this exercise for several reasons. Each aspect of the construction and design of this building was distinctive in some way. For instance, the office tower is currently being constructed on top of an existing electrical substation, which poses unique problems in the areas of construction and structural design. The electrical substation supplies energy to the building above it, but the occupants of that building must be protected from the electromagnetic field that it produces. The owner of the substation, Baltimore Gas & Electric, requested that the building's mechanical supply be completely separated from those of the office tower above. The building is the first in a series of structures intending to revamp and modernize the architectural appearance of downtown Baltimore. Such a variety of problems and opportunities was intriguing.

The structural system of 750 East Pratt is the primary focus of this thesis project. After a thorough analysis of the existing conditions and problems encountered in tying a working structural system to an existing one, I decided to redesign both the substation and the office tower as if they were one working structure and perform a comparison of these results to the original design. This comparison showed the possible benefits of an optimized design and demonstrated not only cost and labor savings but the many other advantages that an optimization (structural efficiency) can offer to a building.

As a result of this structural redesign, the architecture of the building needed to be altered, and so I made this the secondary focus of my thesis project. Compliance to fire code was verified and the integral part that this particular building plays in the architecture of downtown Baltimore was considered. The appearance of the building at night was also considered, and a lighting design was performed on the exterior pedestrian space at the foot of the building.

This book summarizes eight months of analysis, research, and design. The Existing Conditions section is a compilation of the studies conducted of the original building design during the fall semester. The Proposal for Redesign section explains the design criteria and preliminary assumptions involved in the concept of my redesign. The Design Methods and Results section explains in detail the procedures undertaken during the spring semester of study and my subsequent results. The Conclusions section is a brief summary of these results.

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