Architecture Commons^™

The Pine School: The Paradise Integrated Natural Education School, Natalie Giombi

Studio Projects

Natalie Giombi’s The PINE School is a school for elementary-level students. Located at a proposed neighborhood center in the northwest of Paradise, the school focuses on environmental education as a means to inspire children. Communal spaces – a library, gymnasium, and administrative offices – are housed in a long bar facing the street. Behind it, facing south, three classroom wings open to a large garden with several outdoor classrooms and a natural play space. The building itself incorporates several sustainable features and so serves as a learning vehicle for the students.

Demographics: Life In Paradise, Elisabeth Frizzell, Victor Hoyos

Research

This poster provides statistical information derived from the US Census Bureau on the town’s population, such as age, race, income, and education levels.

The most salient points derived from this information have to do with the inhabitants’ median age, ethnicity, and income. By these measures and compared to the population of California as a whole, the citizenry of Paradise was generally older (median age of 50 versus 36), whiter (92% versus 72%), and less educated (percentage with a bachelor's degree or higher 25% versus 32%). The town also has fewer households with children (30% versus 46%) and proportionally more people …

Reunite Community, Gabrielle Icardo, Victor Hoyos, Nolan Delgado

Goals

While the bulk of Paradise would remain as it was – a single-family community nestled in the pine forest – the students wanted to counter the lack of a sense of place in Paradise. To that end, they proposed creating several areas throughout the town that would have a more village-like or Main Street atmosphere.

The largest of these would be two pedestrian-oriented districts at either end of the main part of Pearson Road, connected by an expanded Paradise Community Park. In these new districts, named East Village and West Village, many of the town’s principal civic, cultural, and commercial …

Camp Fire Memorial Museum, Gabrielle Icardo

Studio Projects

Gabrielle Icardo’s Camp Fire Memorial Museum, located between the proposed East and West Villages, seeks to celebrate the town’s show of resilience, dedication, and sense of community after the fire, as well as to help in the transition towards recovery. Featuring exhibits about the town, as well as a memorial to victims of the fire, the museum pays homage to the past and looks forward to a brighter future.

Land Use Patterns: Life In Paradise, Sophia Smith, Nolan Delgado, Tiana Shiroma

Research

This poster shows a map of the town, depicting the different land uses. As shown here, most of the town was zoned low-density residential. While there were some higher density residential developments, apartment complexes and mobile home parks, for example, single-family homes were the dominant house type. Commercial zones were concentrated on the two main north-south routes, Skyway and Clark Roads.

The map shows the many riparian corridors in the town, as well as various community facilities. Agricultural areas are prevalent on the south side of town, and resource conservation areas are located on the east and west.

Greenbelt, Maryland: Planning Precedent, Emma Puryear, Gabrielle Icardo

Precedents

Greenbelt, Maryland (1935-38): Greenbelt was one of three so-called “greenbelt towns” built by the federal government as a response to the jobs and housing crises of the Great Depression. Located in forested land on a broad ridge some eight miles from Washington D.C., the town was conceived as a public cooperative community based on ideas promoted by Rexford Guy Tugwell, head of President Roosevelt’s Resettlement Administration. Tugwell wanted the towns to foster community spirit by combining the best of rural life and urban life: woods and open spaces, theaters and shops.

The purpose of studying at this precedent was to …

The Meeting Place: Library And Internet Cafe, Nolan Delgado

Studio Projects

Nolan Delgado’s The Meeting Place is a library and internet cafe, located in the new park in the middle of the proposed East Village downtown. The building form is divided into separate zones that step up the gently sloping site. Within, the different zones are intended for different types of activities, such as quiet, private reading or study areas for different age groups, as well as more active zones for groups and co-working. A “walking library” – a zigzagging ramp lined with bookshelves – and a green roof are main features.

The Ranch, Foster Westover

Studio Projects

Foster Westover’s The Ranch is a mixed-use project located in the proposed East Village downtown. It’s intended to be a kind of “town within the town.” Comprised of eight separate buildings of different sizes, arranged in an irregular pattern on a sloping site, the buildings creating a number of intimate outdoor spaces between them – paths, courtyards, and an amphitheater, all intended to encourage social interaction among the residents. The buildings’ ground floors have a mix of retail spaces, amenity spaces for the residents, and some apartments, which range from two- to four-bedrooms in size.

Framework: A Workforce Housing Project, Killian Angell

Studio Projects

Killian Angell’s Framework is a mixed-use workforce housing project, located in the proposed East Village. The arrangement of the bars of housing, courtyards, and green spaces seeks to foster interaction and a sense of community with the residents. Housing units, accommodating both individuals and growing families, sit above commercial spaces on the street level.

Single Parent Co-Housing, Tiana Shiroma

Studio Projects

Tiana Shiroma’s Single Parent Co-Housing project is located in a proposed neighborhood center in northwest Paradise on Billie Road. Co-housing is a communal way of living, intended to provide an affordable housing option. This one, designed for single parents and transitional families, is comprised of four separate buildings – each one with communal kitchens, dining rooms, and living rooms on the ground floor, and apartments above – that form a large, protected courtyard.

Paradise Eco-Resort And Conference Center, Ryan M. Huddlestun

Studio Projects

Ryan Huddlestun’s Eco-Resort and Conference Center, located on the northwest edge of town overlooking Little Butte Creek canyon, is intended to be a draw for out-of-town organizations. Conference attendees can work and relax surrounded by nature. The arrangement of the conference center and hotel rooms on the site is meant to minimize disruption of the existing trees and wildlife.

Paradise Museum Of The Natural World, Emma Puryear

Studio Projects

Emma Puryear’s Museum of the Natural World seeks to create a familiar project, both aesthetically and content-wise, that reconnects residents with the natural world. Located between the East and West Villages, it will be a place for everyone in the community as a cultural center that seeks to promote responsible environmentalism. The project seeks also to revitalize Paradise Park by incorporating an outdoor eco-exhibit and community garden.

Reconnect Nature, Ryan M. Huddlestun, Victor Hoyos, Natalie Giombi, Sophia Smith, Kaleena Klimeck, Nolan Delgado

Goals

The several initiatives described in “Reconnect Nature” seek to preserve and enhance Paradise’s relationship to its setting in a beautiful, yet all too fragile, pine and oak forest. Limiting sprawl, preserving wildlife and natural vegetation, creating parks, and creating buildings that merge with their surroundings – these were all ways to keep the town’s sylvan character.

At the same time, Paradise needed to make sure that calamities like the Camp Fire do not recur. To that end, the natural environment in and around the town needs to be tended: by clearing vegetation around buildings, by creating fire routes through the …

Lake Village: Mixed-Use Downtown Living, Ali Chen

Studio Projects

Ali Chen’s Lake Village is a mixed-use workforce housing project, located in the proposed East Village downtown. There are three clusters of housing, each cluster opening onto its own courtyard and creating a mini-neighborhood within the whole. Pathways connect the courtyards with the surrounding streets, which are lined with shops.

The Canopy, Khoa Le

Studio Projects

Khoa Le’s The Canopy is a mixed-use project located in the proposed East Village downtown. The project is actually four buildings: three of them have apartments sitting atop a commercial base of shops and cafés; the fourth is a one-story farmer’s market. The buildings form an intimate network of pedestrian alleyways and a small plaza, all covered by an airy roof structure, the canopy, which allows for public events and an expanded farmer’s market in the public realm – rain or shine.

Form Based Codes And Economic Impacts: A Multivariate Regression Analysis And Case Study, Jacob M. Howard

Master's Theses

After a 100-year history, traditional zoning practices are being challenged as a contributing factor in a number of social, heath and economic problems facing cities in the United States. In this context, form based codes have emerged as a possible alternative way for cities to guide development. Growing out of the New Urbanist movement, form based codes frequently mix uses, allow for a greater variety of housing types and encourage development that is both denser and more compact. Despite an established literature which links land-use regulations, and zoning in particular, to fiscal outcomes, the impacts that form based codes have …

Clt Shearwall Dovetail Connection, Alexander Eduardo Esser, August Messano

Architectural Engineering

As cross-laminated timber has become an increasingly popular construction material, its use as a shear wall element has also demanded attention. Primary obstructions to the use of CLT shear walls have been the lack of an economic connection type that does not compromise the structural integrity and has the robustness that CLT shear wall panels deserve. Dovetail connections provide a great option for the connection of CLT shear walls. With more experimentation, the optimal dovetail geometry can be further developed. The small-scale testing done in conjunction with this report proved that very deep pins and tails will result in bearing …

Unexpected Setbacks When Excavating – Using Gpr For Mitigating Risk: A Case Study, Samuel L. Marcum

Construction Management

Whether constructing on undeveloped land or on an existing developed site, there is a risk of encountering unexpected objects when excavating. With today’s technology in Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR), this risk can generally be mitigated. Using Whiting-Turner’s construction of Stanford University’s new ChEM-H & SNI Building as an example, this case study discusses the use of GPR for underground mapping, as well as various ways to implement GPR technology. The ChEM-H & SNI site had many underground utilities that required precise pot-holing to verify locations. Although pot-holing is widely used, it is a destructive method, it is time and labor …

Tanzanian Cement Block, Emmanuel Castano-Bonilla, Leah Holleran, Kristy Sanchez

Architectural Engineering

The construction plans for a polytechnic college are being developed in the town of Same, Tanzania, Africa. This project is sponsored by the Mbesese Initiative for Sustainable Design (MISD), a non-profit that has partnered with design firms such as ARUP and KLA architects to complete the work. Considering that the site is located in rural Tanzania, material availability is limited. A local block maker produces a mechanically pressed brick that consists solely of sand, cement and water. The bricks are unconventional when compared to those made in the United States. The purpose of this study is to understand the block …

Kind Gestures: Longtime Aci Members Shape The Career Of Younger Generations, Anahid A. Behrouzi

Architectural Engineering

In this article, an Assistant Professor at California Polytechnic State University describes how her involvement with ACI has helped her to embark on projects that, as a young faculty member, she could have never envisioned. She also tells of her first ACI convention in Spring 2013, her first interaction with ACI Committee 133, Disaster Reconnaissance, in 2014, and using the ACI 318 Building Code in the classroom.

The Evaluation Of Current Wall-To-Roof Anchorage Force Provisions For Single-Story Concrete And Masonry Buildings With Lightweight Flexible Diaphragms, John Lawson, Maria Koliou, Andre Filiatrault, Dominic Kelly

Architectural Engineering

Along the seismically active west coast of the United States (US), heavy concrete and masonry walled buildings with lightweight wood or steel flexible roof diaphragms are commonplace and have grown in size over the years. The current force levels found in ASCE’s Minimum Design Loads and Associated Criteria for Buildings and Other Structures (ASCE 7-16) for designing the out-of-plane wall anchorage system in these buildings is the result from a series of California earthquakes, causing a series of structural failures and subsequently revisions to the Uniform Building Code (UBC). This trial-and-error approach is the basis for current wall anchorage code …

An Introduction To Deep Learning, Maria Pantoja, Anahid A. Behrouzi, Drazen Fabris

Architectural Engineering

Deep learning (DL) is currently being researched and implemented to solve civil engineering related problems, including autonomous inspection and inventory of civil infrastructure projects. The article introduces DL, specifically a convolutional neural network and the supervised learning process used to train a model that will enable professional structural engineers to automatically detect types of earthquake damage.

Revisiting Earthquake Lessons: Wall Anchorage To Flexible Diaphragms, John W. Lawson

Architectural Engineering

In the 1971 San Fernando earthquake, large numbers of concrete tilt-up warehouse buildings had partial roof collapses as perimeter walls separated from the roof. The culprit was a design flaw that relied upon wood ledgers in cross-grain tension/bending for anchorage of the wall to the roof diaphragm. In the 1984 Morgan Hill and 1989 Loma Prieta earthquakes, instrumented tilt-up buildings indicated that past code-level anchorage forces were too low; and in the 1994 Northridge earthquake it was observed that anchorage systems had insufficient ductility and overstrength to resist the high force demands.

Beyond Human Intelligence: Redefining Intelligence, Jens Pohl

Architecture

The digital revolution driven by global connectivity, computing as a utility, artificial intelligence, and information sharing on an unprecedented scale is forcing the redefinition of intelligence in a broader context that extends beyond human intelligence. This paper addresses the principal characteristics of biological intelligence, as it exists on planet Earth and the form it may take in an extraterrestrial context. Human intelligence, as the most evolved form of biological intelligence on Earth, is treated as the aggregation of multiple intelligences that cannot be encapsulated in a single metric such as an Intelligence Quotient (IQ). The concept of a postbiological civilization …

Celebrating 20 Years Of The Exceed Teaching Workshop, Allen C. Estes, Stephen J. Ressler, Camilla M. Saviz, Brock E. Barry, Carol L. Considine, Dion Coward, Norman D. Dennis Jr., Scott R. Hamilton, David S. Hurwitz, Tanya Kunberger, Thomas A. Lenox, Tonya Lynn Nilsson, Leslie Nolen, James J. O'Brien Jr., Robert James O'Neill, David A. Saftner, Kelly Salyards, Ronald W. Welch

Architectural Engineering

In response to the clear need for faculty training, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) developed and funded Project ExCEEd (Excellence in Civil Engineering Education) which is celebrating its twentieth year of existence. For the past two decades, 38 ExCEEd Teaching Workshops (ETW) have been held at six different universities. The program has 910 graduates from over 267 different U.S. and international colleges and universities. The ExCEEd effort has transformed from one that relied on the grass roots support of its participants to one that is supported and embraced by department heads and deans. This paper summarizes the history …

Adjusting To The New Abet Criteria 3 And 5: It’S Really Not Very Hard, Allen C. Estes, Peter Laursen, Pamalee A. Brady

Architectural Engineering

ABET has revised the criteria 3 (Student Outcomes) and 5 (Curriculum) of the general criteria. These changes have made it through the rigorous approval process and will be effective for the 2019-20 academic year. This paper analyzes the differences between the existing criteria and the proposed changes. Through a specific detailed example, the paper illustrates how an existing assessment system can seamlessly be adjusted for the new criteria. Most of the embedded indicators and direct measures of attainment can still be used. The results simply need to be organized differently.

Seismic Performance Of Slender C-Shaped Walls Subjected To Unii- And Bi-Directional Loading, Anahid A. Behrouzi, A. Mock, D. Lehman, L. Lowes, D. Kuchma

Architectural Engineering

Reinforced concrete structural walls are common as the primary lateral load resisting system in modern mid- and high-rise buildings constructed in seismic regions, yet few research programs have investigated the seismic performance of modern, slender walls with nonplanar cross-sectional geometries. Three large-scale, C-shaped wall specimens, designed per ACI 318-08, were tested under uni- and bi-directional loading at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). This paper presents experimental results including the cyclic load-deformation response and measured versus nominal flexural/shear strengths as well as a description of damage sequence. Final failure occurs due to a flexure-tension failure of boundary elements where …

Deep Learning For Automated Image Classification Of Seismic Damage To Built Infrastructure, B. Patterson, G. Leone, Maria Pantoja, Anahid A. Behrouzi

Architectural Engineering

The amount of structural damage image data produced in the aftermath of an earthquake can be staggering. It is challenging for a few human volunteers to efficiently filter and tag these images with meaningful damage information. The proposed solution is to automate post-earthquake reconnaissance image tagging activities by training a computer algorithm to classify each occurrence of damage per building material and structural member type. The approach is based on deep learning (DL), a subset of machine learning loosely based on the operation of a biologic neural system, which aims to learn and extract accurate representations from large data sets. …

Photo Tagging Tool For Rapid And Detailed Post-Earthquake Structural Damage Identification, Anahid A. Behrouzi, Maria Pantoja

Architectural Engineering

A significant task in earthquake reconnaissance is to conduct rapid and accurate assessments of damage to built infrastructure. This can be accomplished, in part, by analyzing the large volumes of high-resolution image data collected after a seismic event. However, detailed image tagging remains a task for trained human volunteers, which is both time-intensive and error prone. The authors developed a software tool to simplify and standardize the process of assigning damage and structure pairs to sub-regions of images. The goal of the tool is to facilitate the tagging of thousands of images from historic and recent earthquakes to train a …

Multidisciplinary Research Efforts In Post-Earthquake Civil Infrastructure Reconnaissance, Jack Bergquist, Anahid A. Behrouzi

Architectural Engineering

To address existing challenges with filtering and classification of post-earthquake structural damage images, the authors are engaged in a multidisciplinary project to develop and train a machine-learning algorithm that identifies relevant photographs and assigns damage tags to those images. The research team is predominantly comprised of undergraduate students and is led by a structural engineering and a computer science faculty. While machine-learning algorithms have been successfully used for image tagging in a variety of fields (health care, manufacturing, etc.), the extension of this approach for earthquake reconnaissance is only just beginning. As such, the creation and development of this tool …