Ellen Marie Reinhard
Ellen is a graduate student in architecture originally from Switzerland. She graduated from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich with a Bachelor of Science ETH in Architecture in 2020 and just recently completed her first option studio on repositioning highrise buildings in New York taught by Associate Professor Marc Simmons. One of her professional experiences was working at Herzog & de Meuron for a little over a year. During this time, she worked on the international urban planning competition "Ronquoz 21" in Sion and on the project FORUM UZH in Zurich, Switzerland, a new education and research center of the University of Zurich.
Previous to her architectural path, she was active as a professional athlete in Orienteering for several years, running for the Swiss Junior National Team at National, European, and World Championships across the globe.
- Upgrade the existing base slab and tower facades by following the current shape of the building
- Strip away and reinvent all of the building's programs in the base slab by integrating movable walls and curtains for maximum flexibility
- Cut out a large void in the base part of the building that acts as the leading programmatic space for events, weddings, graduation ceremonies, conventions, and more
- Redesign the upper tower hotel dorms to meet current and future ways of working/sleeping/living
Moving beyond the physical alterations to this specific case, the proposal aimed at tackling questions on the hotel typology overall. Its unusual and unpredicted energy consumption is one of many factors that need to be studied in more detail to understand this typology's potential better when tackling climate-related issues. In addition, more resilient, flexible, and programmatic strategies need to be developed to avoid massive financial losses caused by significant disruptions, including recent issues caused by the pandemic.
The unused lot located in the southern part of Amarillo, Texas, is approximately 10,000m2 large. The climate of Amarillo is in a semi-arid region where temperatures can go up to 38°C in summer. For this, we decided to shape our building according to the sun's path to maximize solar gains and natural daylight throughout the space. Consequentially, we created a baseline scenario using ClimateStudio to estimate the projected energy use. This baseline would allow us to understand the percentage of energy use reduction better when optimizing the building‘s performance. Further, implemented PV panels on top of the roof allowed for a 105.1% coverage of the building's estimated energy consumption with a projected payback time of roughly 5.6 years.
