Learning long distance
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A view of Nick Crompton's
group project
(15K
JPG)
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 ere’s a tall order:
Assemble a team of architects, engineers and construction managers spread
not only across the country, but across the globe. In four months’
time, design a 30,000-square-foot general-purpose engineering building
using sustainable materials and practices. Include space for early move-in
rooms and site the structure atop either a square or an L-shaped footprint.
Spend no more than $5.5 million, but wait to build until 2015.
It’s a challenge four UW-Madison students met
this spring, when they participated in a unique distance-learning course
based at Stanford University. “The whole goal of the course is
to facilitate a working relationship between an architect, an engineer
and a construction manager,” says Justin Schmidt, who graduated
this May with a bachelor’s degree in the department’s construction
engineering and management program.
The students—Schmidt, undergraduates Nick Crompton
and Pete Dering, and master’s candidate Scott Markowski—are
members of separate teams that included students from Stanford, Georgia
Institute of Technology, Bauhaus University, Germany; KTH (Royal Institute
of Technology), Sweden; and the University of Manchester, England.
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Another view of Nick
Crompton's group project
(13K
JPG) |
In January, they briefly met all of the members of
their class at Stanford. Then for the rest of the semester, each group
used technologies such as teleconferencing, Internet meeting software
and Internet telephony to hold formal meetings at least once a week.
At other times, team members communicated via instant messages or by
posting comments and documents to an online course bulletin board. Additionally,
they “attended” a four-hour course lecture from 2 p.m. to
6 p.m. central time on Fridays. “It’s not as bad for us,”
says Schmidt, “but if you take into account that Europe has to
be in it, they’re doing it from 9 p.m. to 1 a.m.”
Schmidt’s group designed a building for the
fictitious engineering school of Express University in the New Mexico
desert. “So along with just building the building, another job
is to make it fit within its environment,” he says.
Not only did his team have to take into account a
protected cactus grove adjacent to its site, orienting the building’s
views toward the grove, yet protecting it from construction spillover,
but members also chose to use adobe as a primary building material.
“None of us has ever worked with adobe,” Schmidt says. “So
that’s a learning process we went through—figuring out how
adobe works and how much it even costs to make.”
Crompton’s building, which is set to be constructed
in Los Angeles, is glass and concrete. Among his group’s concerns
were temperature and wind considerations, while another team had to
worry about cold, frost lines, snow and the timeline for enclosing its
building. A few of the teams also had to consider the potential for
earthquakes.
Initially, says Crompton, the architects in the
group carried most of the workload. They developed the building’s
concept, while the engineers (like Markowski) ensured their design would
be structurally sound and cost-effective and would incorporate the right
materials. As construction managers, he, Schmidt and Dering “built”
their group’s designs, using a 4-D model, with the fourth dimension
being time. The result is a time-lapse “video” of how construction
progresses.
While each team experienced challenges—most
notably, the difficulty of interacting with group members without meeting
face to face—overall, says Schmidt, the course was an excellent
experience.
“You get to see how people in other disciplines
think, instead of just working with other construction management people
or other structural people,” he says. “You can see what
the architect was thinking about when he was designing the building
and what the engineer was thinking about when he was looking at it.
Knowing their thought processes to get to their design—it kind
of helps you learn more about the building, how it’s going up
and why it should be built that way. It gives you a better understanding
of how buildings are built.”
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