Architecture Commons^™

The Wall Group, Richard Antablin, Sara Engmyr, Michelle Griffith, Jora Leigh, Jesse Rainsdon

Architectural Engineering

This project aimed to design and construct an art wall in Poly Canyon to deter graffiti on existing structures and provide a designated area for student expression. However, after prolonged iterative revisions, it became evident that the project was significantly behind the original timeline.

It was recommended that the wall proposal be submitted for future student implementation. Instead of constructing the wall, an alternative course of action was proposed: restoring an existing structure in Poly Canyon to provide the desired hands-on experience.

After careful consideration, the Techite Bridge was selected for restoration. The proposed plan involves thorough cleaning, repairing chipped …

Smith Property Pre-Engineered Metal Barn, Trent Arjay Olmstead

Architectural Engineering

The Smith Residence Barn is a pre-engineered metal building designed to provide additional storage and workspace. The Architectural design was created by the Nunno Corporation, a San Luis Obispo based steel building general contractor. The soils report was created by Mid-Coast Geotechnical, INC. and the report’s conclusions were used for determining site conditions related to the foundation and lateral force system design. The structural calculations and plans were created by Trent Olmstead and reviewed by Brian Marc-Aurele, SE and Chris Murphy, SE. All calculations were done in accordance with the 2022 CBC, ASCE 7-16, 2023 AISC, ACI 318-19, and AISI …

Earning Engagement As A Graduate Student Instructor, Matthew Sloss

Architectural Engineering

One of the key benefits of a Cal Poly education is access to experienced instructors in a small classroom setting. In my final quarter at Cal Poly, I had the opportunity to glance behind the curtain and fill the significant shoes of an instructor of an introductory structural statics class. What initially was a chance to lend a hand to the department by sharing my limited experience turned into a thorough exploration of what it means to be productively engaging and of how to utilize the underrealized power of asking questions in the classroom setting. This report documents my experiences …

Cardboard Concrete Column Formwork, Danny Shrestha, Joelle Schalesky

Architectural Engineering

This project is an exploration of cardboard as a potential material for construction formwork for concrete columns. Multiple material tests were conducted to explore the behavior of cardboard and concrete. Multiple specimens of cardboard were tested for modulus of elasticity, moment of inertia, and tensile strength. Concrete was tested for its apparent lateral fluid pressure under vibration. Cardboard formwork was then designed and constructed based on these tested behaviors. The final design of the formwork consisted of folding cardboard sheets lined with hardboard, supported by wood studs, and tied by plastic banding straps.

Ultimately, two concrete columns―8' and 10' in …

Santa Maria Climate Action Plan Recommendations: Building Energy And Transportation, Thomas Zimmerman, Elena Blewett

City and Regional Planning

The Santa Maria Climate Action Plan Recommendations addresses GHG emissions reduction for the largest sectors in the City of Santa Maria- Building Energy and Transportation. The project includes GHG forecasts and reduction targets from the City’s Draft 2020 Community-Wide Greenhouse Gas Inventory Report. The reduction targets are met through a series of actionable measures to help the City meet aggressive reduction targets by 2030 and 2045.

Urban Design Guidelines: San Antonio Road Corridor, Palo Alto, Ca, Cassidy T. Charles, Madeleine Emeric

City and Regional Planning

Urban design guidelines are a set of principles, standards, and recommendations that guide the planning, development, and construction of urban spaces. The guidelines aim to enhance the physical environment of cities and communities, improving functionality, aesthetics, sustainability, and overall quality of life. They provide a basis for making design decisions that are consistent with the City’s needs and the community’s interest.

This document is specifically tailored to the San Antonio Road Corridor in Palo Alto. Each section is supported by extensive research on existing conditions, case studies, and best practices. The document includes an introduction, a brief overview of existing …

Ace Mentor Program - Central Coast Chapter, Brayden Samuel Groshart

Construction Management

For my senior project, I established a chapter of the ACE (Architecture, Construction, and Engineering) Mentor Program in San Luis Obispo, California. This program provides high school students with hands-on experience and exposure to careers in the architecture, construction, and engineering industries. The program spanned eight weeks, balancing theoretical knowledge and practical application. The curriculum began with sessions on the fundamentals of architecture, engineering, and construction. In order to expose the students to real world practices, we organized tours of an architecture firm, an engineering firm, and an active construction site. These visits allowed students to engage with professionals, observe …

San Luis Obispo High School Ffa Farm Chicken Coop Construction, Sofia A. Amalfitano

Construction Management

This paper details the preconstruction and construction process accomplished by a team of California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo Construction Management students during the construction of a new chicken coop for the San Luis Obispo High School’s FFA program. The project, initiated in the fall of 2023, aimed to replace the existing temporary coop to a larger, more functional structure capable of comfortably housing approximately a dozen chickens while ensuring their safety and well-being. While the primary focus of this paper revolves around the preconstruction and construction phases, it also touches upon the design phases, as these stages involved …

Effect Of Pismo Clams As Partial Fine And Coarse Aggregate Replacement On Workability And Compressive Strength Of Concrete, Alan Munoz Pille

Construction Management

Concrete has been utilized for ages. Unfortunately, over the hundreds of years there has been little development in the applications of new aggregate materials. The world is moving towards a sustainable way of living and as a result seashells have come into the mix. Pismo Clams are a native species to San Luis Obispo County. This marine species has the possibility of becoming a partial aggregate replacement for fine and coarse aggregates in concrete. The results of prior studies indicate a possible application of seashell use in concrete. This paper evaluates the workability and compressive strength of concrete containing fine …

City Sonatas, Duoduo Lin

Masters Theses

Countries like the UK and France, as shown in Statista's 2023 report, benefit from significant national cultural attractions and monuments that boost museum attendance by attracting tourists. The data suggests a positive correlation between museum attendance and the historical significance, as well as the suitability for tourism, of the institutions2. However, faced with rapid societal advancements, most museums' responses to these challenges have been varied and slow. Contemporary museums, as crucial conduits for the dissemination and exchange of artistic culture, continue to face persistent challenges of low engagement and levels of attention in many countries. Furthermore, a series of remarkably …

Witnessing Timelessness: Revitalizing Heritage Tourism In The Ruins Of Saudi Arabia, Reem Habis

Masters Theses

Well-known historic sites in Saudi Arabia, such as Historic Jeddah, are designated as heritage, meaning they are protected from deterioration over time. However, in the Aseer region, there are over 4500 unprotected modest sites that provide an integral sense of identity and authenticity to the culture of not just this region, but the entire Kingdom. The absence of preservation guidelines has left these sites vulnerable to indiscriminate developments attempting revitalization. Undesignated heritage sites must be safeguarded and rehabilitated rather than neglected and left at risk of further decay, especially with the encroachment of tourism.

To preserve the sites’ authenticity and …

Snowstorm, Caleb Shafer

Masters Theses

This thesis explores the connection between memory and place-building, focusing on how personal narratives and physical models compress details to reveal their core essence. Memories serve as a bridge between time and space, allowing for a non-linear experience of time and offering a unique perspective on the existence and transformation of places. Although this compression involves some loss, it generates new narratives and insights into life while examining the power structures and cultural systems inherent in representation.

Culinary Community: Collaborative Relationship Building Through Improvisational Fine Dining, Victoria Goodisman

Masters Theses

I am redesigning the fine dining experience to create a space for community building and forming new interpersonal bonds. In response to the pandemic, people learned the pressing need for face to face connection. The current landscape of fine dining inadvertently perpetuates isolation by creating a hierarchical dynamic that separates customers from service staff. This project proposes a restaurant where patrons actively participate in creating their dining experience, blurring the lines between customers and staff. By understanding the restaurant experience through the lens of performance and improvisational theater, we can redefine how people engage with this space. Customers collectively assume …

Umbrales (Thresholds), Maureen Scally

Masters Theses

Umbrales is Spanish for Thresholds.

Thresholds are by nature ambivalent spaces, inviting two distinct realities into play. As an artist, I materialize my experiences as a migrant into an architectural form. A series of textile walls shape a space that is simultaneously interior and exterior so that the audience circulates in the negative space in between. It is in the construction of this threshold condition — a simultaneous placement, neither here nor there — that a complex narrative of place unfolds.

Architecture As A Carbon-Based Practice, Qixin Yu

Masters Theses

Carbon serves as both a silent protagonist and a looming antagonist in the narrative of architecture, shaping not only the physical structures we inhabit but also the ecological legacy we leave behind.

Centuries of human exploitation of the environment have led to climate and material crises. Shifting this dynamic requires action at micro (matter), meso (material), and macro (materiality) levels. Biogenic materials offer significant potential for carbon sequestration and present opportunities for the building industry to collaborate with nature rather than merely extract from it.

This thesis establishes a research and manufacturing practice that prioritizes material innovation, carbon sequestration, environmental …

Living Surfaces, Ryan R. Sotelo

Masters Theses

This thesis examines the role of architectural surfaces as a staging ground for personal objects that carry with them aspects of memory, narrative, and personal histories. The lived experience within architecture is often dismissed with the architect’s role in a building’s life ending at its physical conception. Architectural representations are often devoid of time, motion and personal histories in sake for spatial clarities. With precedent representations such as period room drawings, motion studies, and photographic guns, there was an interest in developing a representation to better examine the lived experience within our architecture.

By incorporating personal testimonies, accurate bedroom documentations …

The Dollhouse, Kristina Miesel

Masters Theses

Dollhouses, while rooted in architectural representation, have historically been excluded from architectural discourse, relegated to the devalued realm of the frivolous and feminine. With a complex history, connected to craft, education, and play dollhouses have commonly been perceived as mere reflections of existing social hierarchies. However, this perception tends to overlook the creative agency wielded by people, particularly girls, as they engage with dollhouses, reinterpreting their functions and challenging norms. Crafted traditionally at a scale of 1:12, these miniature homes intricately capture different aspects of our domestic environment. Within the walls of a dollhouse, architectural elements often assume a secondary …

Unconditioning Air, Weijia Deng

Masters Theses

Unconditioning Air rethinks the boundaries contrived through environmental control. For more than a century, HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning) defined the boundaries of interior air. The regime and tools of mechanical conditioning promise stability and manageability of indoor air quality at the expense of external phenomena, and by extension, any complexity or fluctuation in the environment. As a result, air conditioning premises that ideal interior comfort is “bubble-like”, requiring increasingly standardized and highly regimented regulatory tools. The plethora of patent drawings, duct specifications, and ASHRAE comfort codes produce an oppressively tightening grip over indoor air and comfort, rendering both …

Rhythm Of Space, Brian Carrillo

Masters Theses

This project innovates architectural representation by exploring the rhythm and flow of spaces, focusing on staircases in the Bayard Ewing Building, the RISD Museum courtyard, the Waterman Building, and Woods-Gerry. It captures the body’s dynamic sequence in these spaces, using drawings or animations to challenge traditional techniques. Emphasizing kinesthetic perception, it offers a fresh perspective on architectural experience. Ultimately, this work enriches our understanding of how architectural elements shape movement and perception, enhancing architectural representation and experience.

Lifelink, Yuan Yuan

Masters Theses

The primary focus of this research is to investigate the historical evolution of urban planning in California and its current urban landscape. The aim is to propose an alternative transit reality for Californians, envisioning a more significant impact not only on urban planning but also on their lifestyles.

Searching For The Hyperobject: Crystals As Transscalar Vehicles, Jay Costello

Masters Theses

When I touch the street outside my house, I'm touching Los Angeles—a contiguous vector of material bisecting a continent. A slab, a stone, dust and oil, a googolplex of tightly packed anisotropic particles... At nightfall, I sneak to the edge of the highway and break off a piece. 'What does it mean for a worm to be aware of the scale of the planet?' Bruno Latour's evocative questioning of scalar jumps prompts an existentialism that places me somewhere between the hyperlocal and the massively distributed. Like a cosmic traveler floating through the universe, I feel adrift. I look around, grasping …

Landing: Body, Site, Material, Renata Berta

Masters Theses

I believe that in order to build on the land, I must establish a profound relationship with it. As an outsider to New England territories, I actively seek this connection through immersive activities such as swimming, surfing, climbing, and extensive walks, immersing myself in the land to better understand it and synchronize with its rhythms. In my artistic and architectural practice, I explore dissolving traditional boundaries, emphasizing the vital return to the land to create a more responsive and embodied architecture that symbiotically engages with the landscape

Within this ongoing project, “Landing: Body, Site, Material,” I conceptualize my body not …

Bilateral Vertical Urbanization, Yifan Huang

Masters Theses

Bilateral Vertical Urbanization envisions a bright future for urban development. Metropolises are currently facing the dilemma of dense population, small living area per capita, long commuting times, traffic congestion, and other urban problems. My thesis proposes an innovative urban development strategy, suggesting the redevelopment of underground space resources in cities to improve urban space utilization and help alleviate the crisis of overcrowding. San Francisco, the shining jewel on the West Coast of the United States, is facing this dilemma, as well as the long-term risks of devastating earthquakes and rising sea levels.

My urban planning methodology points out that we …

Urban Looms, Recoloring City, Ella Son

Masters Theses

The metropolis has been a dominant and defining aspect of my life. Acutely aware of visual illusions created by the choreographed and unchoreographed movements of people in the streets and the distortions of light and shadow on the glass facades of skyscrapers, I reinterpret the patterns and colors that are in constant interplay into a collection of architectural textiles.

With an emphasis on optical layering, these immersive installations recreate the quality of being spellbound in the city. Scaled to emphasize verticality and activated through transparent overlays and dense color interplay, a rich visual field is activated. In their application, the …

Small Islands Commons: Retrieving Territory, Identity And Rights In The Bahamas, Fangzhou Zhao

Masters Theses

The Earth’s surface area comprises 71% ocean and 29% land. This vast disparity has led to the conceptualization of the Earth as a collection of interconnected islands, a perspective that challenges traditional views which often portray islands as isolated, marginal, or primitive. These narratives have been further complicated by the effects of climate change, which positions islands as vulnerable and in need of attention.

This research seeks to explore new socio-cultural contracts with territories to achieve bio-socio-spatial justice. It aims to maintain sustainable and equitable relationships between governments and local communities, focusing on addressing historical inequalities. By examining landscape-based strategies …

Memory And Experiential Lab, Yufan Xu

Masters Theses

In the tapestry of our lives, there exist moments and places that we can never revisit, scenes etched into our memories that fade with the passage of time. These experiences and memories are treasures, provide us with an anchor to our past. Unfortunately, many of these moments are like fireflies in the night, here one moment and gone the next. Yet, they remain invaluable, forever etched in our hearts and minds. I wonder if it is possible to trigger cherished past experiences and memories in our daily lives, allowing individuals to re-experience similar moments, thereby nourishing the spiritual world. Therefore, …

Revitalizing Public Spaces: Integrating Mental Exercise Into Contemporary Landscape Architecture Design, Silin Wang

Masters Theses

The most popular video games have attracted a large number of young people with their immersive digital landscapes which offer rich opportunities for active navigation and thought. This has likely led to many spending more time exploring virtual environments rather than the real, outdoor landscapes. Meanwhile, many citizens have expressed dissatisfaction with the lack of interaction and spiritual resonance in modern urban public spaces. In this context, a common criticism of Landscape Architecture is its frequent use of a formulaic design language in contemporary landscape design. Critics such as Christophe Girot argue that this approach causes landscapes to lose their …

Spirit Of Place: Examining Chinese Principles Of Place-Making In A Contemporary Urban Context, Junyi Shi

Masters Theses

Cities are carriers of both spiritual civilization and physical space. The concept of Chinese cities has existed for about four thousand years, embodying China’s extensive cultural and philosophical heritage. Feng Shui is a specialized theory in Chinese urban planning. Therefore, discussing Chinese cities inevitably involves examining the role of Feng Shui in urban construction.

However, contemporary Chinese urban planning development has almost abandoned traditional Feng Shui. As a result, Chinese cities have become homogenized by Western models, losing their distinctiveness and cultural expression.

Given this issue, this thesis project will use traditional Chinese philosophy as a foundation to study the …

Patchwork: 76km Between Juárez And El Paso, Naheyla Medina

Masters Theses

Located at the western edge of Texas where the Río Bravo ~ Rio Grande, becomes the border between México and the United States. Resides a spectacle of misconceptions that, along with an expansive corten steel border wall embedded into the earth, live to suppress the histories, culture, and environment entangled together like patchwork along this border space. The built environment influences our daily experiences, and our daily experiences can often influence our built environment. This project seeks to leverage, murals as a medium, creative writing, and architectural representations, to rework the mapping between Mexico and the US. Honing in on …

Frontier: Land, Architecture, And Abstraction, Jacob Boatman

Masters Theses

The abstraction of land is a colonial process by which physical land is transformed into a conceptual or symbolic entity. This transformation occurs through various economic, architectural, and cultural practices that imbue land with abstract values, meanings, and functions beyond its physicality. This includes the division of land into parcels for economic transactions, the design and construction of built environments that shape human interactions with the land, and the cultural narratives and representations that ascribe significance to particular landscapes. Through abstraction, colonial powers devalue indigenous perspectives and relationships to the land, reducing them to mere obstacles in the path of …