The Structure

I originally planned on using a type of plant form as my structure with the chloroplasts and other organelles as one scale, the veins another, and finally a single leaf as the last scale. Later, though, when I heard people discussing bike racks and the Penn card swipe system, I decided to find a structure that is more unique to Penn.
Since I live in the Harnwell college house, I chose the glass windows/walls of the Rooftop Lounge as my structure. Besides the one side that accommodates the entrance, the lounge is surrounded by almost wall-length windows that look out onto the city on three sides.
On the smallest scale, the windows are composed primarily of silica, soda, and other molecules. These chemical interactions and bonds that make up the glass occur in the nanoscopic world, which is 1 X 10-9 m length scale. Switching to a slightly larger scale, the entire structure is made of numerous, smaller, window panes. These sheets of glass vary in size a bit, but they are all fractions or small multiples of 1 m, so the panes are 1 m length scale. For example, the smallest pane is .6 x 1 m (.6 m2) where as the largest one is approximately 1.7 x 2.9 m (4.93 m2). The final length scale is the whole structure, which resembles a rectangle that measures approximately 14 x 9 m with the area being 126 m2. Therefore, the largest length scale is 1 X 102 m.