Architecture Commons^™

How Can Biomimicry Inform A Sustainable, Ethical Future In Architecture And Design?, Chloe Hanf

University Honors Theses

This publication traces effects of systems theory and assemblage thinking on American architecture and design since the 1960's in relation to contemporary ecological thought and biological discoveries. Building upon these observations, the author concludes that biomimicry belongs at the forefront of contemporary theory and praxis in architecture and design.

Shellter Beer Garden: The Redevelopment Of An Abandoned Parcel Into A Community Gathering Space, Madison Leonard, Lainie Kastner

City and Regional Planning

The Shell Beach neighborhood of Pismo Beach serves a quiet, active community in need of an enjoyable, outdoor community gathering space. While the current main street, Shell Beach Road, has undergone major streetscape improvements, there are still vacant parcels in need of refurbishments. A vacant lot on the corner of Shell Beach Road and Cuyama Avenue that previously served the community as a drive-thru restaurant, now provides a desirable site for business. At the location of 1901 Shell Beach Road, a community beer garden built out of shipping containers will provide an ideal space for the Shell Beach community to …

Cal Poly Campus Safety: Policy Proposal, Alan Cazares, Phung (Karen) Bich La, Junhyun Kim

City and Regional Planning

As described in this project, the California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo is in need of improving the campus’s sense of safety and safety features. With an increasing student population and increasing dangers, the importance of safety for all is becoming evident. The COVID-19 pandemic has taught us that it is essential to have proper safety features and preventative measures in place to keep the student and faculty population safe. The project’s goal is to produce safety recommendations that could be used to amend the existing 2035 Campus Master Plan. Currently, safety is not a topic extensively covered in …

Spheres Development Package, Nate R. Antepenko, Dan Benaroch, Dominic Ferrari

City and Regional Planning

The Spheres, live work play development concept is located adjacent to Higuera St, along an arterial road that primarily contains industrial and commercial land uses. The proposed development site is intended to enhance the city of San Luis Obispo by addressing the necessities of the surrounding community.

The development proposal adopts the Urban Design principle, Smart Growth Planning, designed to direct development into areas that have adequate utility capacity and transportation networks and to encourage walkable communities. The Spheres development site fosters fluid spaces, where residents live in a walkable radius to work, eliminating long commutes, in order to eliminate …

Cityengine As A Tool For Visualizing Neighborhood Change: An Initial Study, Zach Noyes

City and Regional Planning

Urban planning is reliant upon genuine public engagement to ensure that planning and policy decisions reflect the ideas shared by the public. Because planning is a profession largely focused on the physical and built implications of more abstract planning concepts, effective graphic communication is critical to securing public support and understanding of policy decisions. ESRI's CityEngine uses procedural modeling technology to render personally-tailored scenes to non-planner members of the public, and shows potential to positively change the way that planners generate graphic representations of physical impacts of policy changes. This initial study establishes a methodology for determining the efficacy of …

An Analysis And Application Of Pedestrian Streets, Ellie Krantz, Austin Lucero

City and Regional Planning

The goal of this project is to closely examine the conversion of traditional roads into pedestrian streets. By studying two examples, we will create an understanding of why cities do this, how they implement pedestrian streets, what results pedestrian streets bring, and what makes a successful conversion project.

The second part of this project is to implement the key takeaways of the research phase into a conceptual design of a similar project for San Luis Obispo. This design based phase will consider the entire scope of the project, detailing project location selection, implementation, and recommendations.

A Redevelopment Plan For Santa Rosa Plaza, Abraham Miranda Roldan, Benjamin K. Ip

City and Regional Planning

The purpose of this document is to hypothesize a successful and innovative plan for the redevelopment of the Santa Rosa Plaza Mall (Downtown Mall) in Santa Rosa, California. This project proposal seeks to address the Plaza Mall’s challenges and provide an alternative solution to develop a unique character that promotes a sense of place, foster vibrant civic spaces, and meets the City’s housing and job needs.

Shopping malls in the United States are dying and are becoming less popular among the new generation, which means malls must adapt to fulfill the role of “third place” that many people need. This …

Designing With Force-Transfer Shear Walls: A Stiff Task To Achieve Better Performance And Cost Savings, Michael Deigert, John W. Lawson

Architectural Engineering

Wood-framed structural panel shear walls designed using the Force Transfer Around Openings (FTAO) method have become a very popular option for engineers, especially in areas with high lateral force requirements. The need for more affordable housing in metropolitan areas is leading to larger and taller multi-family residential buildings, and these typically wood-framed structures can benefit from the innovative approach behind FTAO design methodology. But do engineers have all the tools they need to accurately determine the stiffness of these walls and the associated lateral force required for their design.

The Beehive, The Favela, The Castle, And The Ministry: Race And Modern Architecture In Rio De Janeiro, 1811–1945, Luisa Valle

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation deploys a multidisciplinary and decolonial framework to investigate the architecture of cortiços, the Favela Hill, the Castelo Hill, and the Ministry of Education and Public Health (MES) building as constitutive of the history of modernization and modernity in the Centro (city center) of Rio de Janeiro, 1811-1945. The first three chapters investigate the distinct geographies, formal and material qualities, and populations of cortiços, the Favela Hill, and the Castelo Hill, as well as their racialization and essentialization by the “unsanitary” and “degenerate” labels bestowed upon these landscapes by the state. Traditional narratives and practices of modern architecture and …

Skip The Grid: Solar Powered Refrigeration In The Navajo Nation, Sydney Jo Sitton

Construction Management

The Skip the Grid project was a combined effort of California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo (Cal Poly) students, and company sponsors SOLV Energy, Dometic, and Goal Zero, facilitated through the non-profit, Heart of America. The interdisciplinary project team successfully installed photovoltaic energy systems with refrigerators and lights for families within the Navajo Nation. Skip the Grid’s mission focuses on improving quality of life and providing access to clean, affordable off-grid energy. In the Navajo Nation, access to electricity and running water is not necessarily a given, with large disparities from family to family. This issue was exacerbated during …

Skip The Grid: Installation Of Solar Powered Refrigeration In The Navajo Nation, Connor T. Avrit

Construction Management

The Skip the Grid project was a project completed with the joint efforts of California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo (Cal Poly) and many other company sponsors including Solv Energy, Dometic, Goal Zero and Heart of America a nonprofit. Skip the Grid’s project goal and outcomes was to improve the quality of life and provide clean sustainable off grid energy to families within the Navajo Nation. The Navajo Nation is located in the Four Corners region of the United States with approximately a third of its residents without the means or circumstances to be tied into grid level power. …

Shabang Music Festival Seating, Carter L. Norton

Construction Management

This outlines the process of the building and installation of four shaded seating areas at the SHABANG Music Festival located at Laguna Lake Park in San Luis Obispo. This paper places an emphasis on the pre-construction elements of the building stage. SHABANG Music Group rented out a section of Laguna Lake Park to host a music festival designed to bring the San Luis Obispo community together. The goal of the project discussed was to build a raised VIP seating area facing the main stage on which music lovers could relax while still being able to enjoy an unobstructed view of …

Caed Hasslein Student Competition, Greta R. Stout

Construction Management

This paper outlines the development of the first CAED Hasslein Student Competition at Cal Poly, SLO. The College of Architecture and Environmental Design at Cal Poly, SLO has not yet been successful in creating a platform to engage students of all five majors to collaborate in an educational atmosphere. This project aims to challenge students to work in teams made up of all five disciplines in a Request for Proposal-style competition. This paper focuses on how the idea of this competition came to be and the steps that were taken to successfully write the competition problem statement. These steps included …

Alternative Redistribution Of Residential Solar Energy, David T. Holmes

Construction Management

The use of solar panels on residential structures has been prevalent since the mid 1970’s and over the decades their presence has become more pronounced and more valued. The creation of energy on-site using clean methods for an individual is truly a remarkable feat. As solar panels become increasingly common, so do the inherent issues and their supporting infrastructure. Of these issues a common inconvenience is what owners are to do with extraneous energy. What this entails is that an owner typically does not have means to store energy that is created in surplus, the resulting solution is the power …

An Analysis Of Construction Estimating Software, Guilianna M. Lozano

Construction Management

There are various components that go into building a construction project. And regardless of the size of the project, construction projects have become increasingly expensive with cost escalations on the rise. The cost element of each construction project is critical to the success of the overall project. In today’s current industry, numerous resources are available that strive to assist the built environment with managing construction costs. Currently, construction firms are maintaining a competitive edge by using the technology that has been made available. The basis of this research, conducted using a quantitative survey, was to provide data that indicated which …

The Site Logistics Design Of The Shabang Slo 2022 Vip Stage, Natalie J. Hodgson

Construction Management

The objective of this project is to take some of the burden off the SHABANG Music Festival organizers and create a detailed plan on how the VIP section of the festival is going to be organized. The SHABANG music festival is an annual, local weekend event for the community of San Luis Obispo. The goal of this project is to create a plan that will be effectively utilized at this year's SHABANG festival. In working toward this goal, every aspect of the Construction Management curriculum that has been taught in our careers thus far will be utilized. For the Construction …

Improving Interprofessional Environmental Health Education Using The Leave No One Behind Framework, Daniel B. Oerther, Sarah E. Oerther

Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

No abstract provided.

On Internal Resonance Analysis Of A Double-Cable-Stayed Shallow-Arch Model With Elastic Supports At Both Ends, Xiaoyang Su, Houjun Kang, Tieding Guo, Guirong Grace Yan

Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

In previous research on the nonlinear dynamics of cable-stayed bridges, boundary conditions were not properly modeled in the modeling. In order to obtain the nonlinear dynamics of cable-stayed bridges more accurately, a double-cable-stayed shallow-arch model with elastic supports at both ends and the initial configuration of bridge deck included in the modeling is developed in this study. The in-plane eigenvalue problems of the model are solved by dividing the shallow arch (SA) into three partitions according to the number of cables and the piecewise functions are taken as trial functions of the SA. Then, the in-plane one-to-one-to-one internal resonance among …

Mechanisms Affecting Viscosity Of Cement Paste Made With Microfines Of Manufactured Sand, Jiang Zhu, Jiaping Liu, Kamal Khayat, Xin Shu, Qianping Ran, Zhen Li

Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Viscosity of cement-based materials incorporating manufactured sand is affected by the content and physical properties of the microfines in the sand. However, some of the mechanisms affecting the viscosity remain unclear. This paper investigates the effect of microfine type and content on the apparent viscosity (ηapp) and residual viscosity in/near pseudo-Newtonian regime (ηrespse−New) of cement pastes. Limestone (LS), slate (ST), and tuff (TF) microfines with different specific surface areas were investigated. Test results showed that, by deducting the greater contribution of yield stress to ηapp when using finer microfines, the increase of ηrespse−New at a given PCE dosage was mainly …

Wavelet Power And Shannon Entropy Applied To Acoustic Emission Signals For Corrosion Detection And Evaluation Of Reinforced Concrete, Jinrui Zhang, Ziye Kang, Dongshuai Hou, Biqin Dong, Hongyan Ma

Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Acoustic emission (AE) signals detected from corrosion test on a steel reinforced concrete beam subjected to the coupling effects of corrosive wet-dry cycles and static load are analyzed by power spectral density, wavelet transform, and Shannon entropy. The degradation process of the corroded reinforced concrete beam can be divided into four stages on the basis of the accumulated event number (AEN). Due to the difference of material properties, steel reinforcement and concrete matrix have distinguished AE features. The time-frequency characteristics of AE signals can reflect the microstructural degradation mechanism of steel corrosion and concrete cracking. The corrosion evaluation entails investigating …