Mechanics in Architecture

Mechanical Rooms
A mechanical room or a boiler room is a room or space in a building dedicated to the mechanical equipment and its associated electrical equipment, as opposed to rooms intended for human occupancy or storage. Unless a building is served by a centralized heating plant, the size of the mechanical room is usually proportional to the size of the building. A small building or home may have at most a utility room but in large buildings mechanical rooms can be of considerable size, often requiring multiple rooms throughout the building, or even occupying one or more complete floors.
 * Mechanical rooms typically house the following equipment:
 * 1) Air handlers
 * 2) Boilers
 * 3) Chillers
 * 4) Heat exchangers
 * 5) Water heaters and tanks
 * 6) Water pumps (for domestic, heating/cooling, and firefighting water)
 * 7) Main distribution piping and valves
 * 8) Sprinkler distribution piping and pumps
 * 9) Back-up electrical generators
 * 10) Elevator machinery
 * 11) Other HVAC (heating, ventilation and air-conditioning) equipment
 * Equipment in mechanical rooms is often operated and maintained by a stationary engineer or a maintenance technician. Modern buildings use control systems to manage HVAC cycles, lighting, communications, and life safety equipment. Often, the control system hardware is located in the mechanical room and monitored or accessed remotely.

Mechanical Floor

 * A mechanical floor, mechanical penthouse, or mechanical level is a story of a high-rise building that is dedicated to mechanical and electronics equipment. "Mechanical" is the most commonly used term, but words such as utility, technical, service, and plant are also used. They are present in all tall buildings including the world's tallest skyscrapers with significant structural, mechanical and aesthetics concerns.
 * While most buildings have mechanical rooms, typically in the basement, tall buildings require dedicated floors throughout the structure for this purpose, for a variety of reasons discussed below. Because they use up valuable floor area (just like elevator shafts), engineers try to minimize the number of mechanical floors while allowing for sufficient redundancy in the services they provide. As a rule of thumb, skyscrapers require a mechanical floor for every 10 tenant floors (10%) although this percentage can vary widely.
 * Some skyscrapers have narrow building cores that require stabilization to prevent collapse. Typically this is accomplished by joining the core to the external supercolumns at regular intervals using outrigger trusses. The triangular shape of the struts precludes the laying of tenant floors, so these sections house mechanical floors instead, typically in groups of two. Additional stabilizer elements such as tuned mass dampers also require mechanical floors to contain or service them.