Sketch of façade of civil engineering building at San Joaquin
Civil engineering building at San Joaquin
My favorite part of Day 4 was visiting PUC’s San Joaquin campus. Not only were the Torres Siamesas and the Innovation Center beautiful buildings, but so were all the others on campus! The campus had so many beautifully designed buildings, as well as landscapes. As you enter the campus, you see the innovation center on the left, a statue in the center, and another interesting building on the right, that work to bring you into the campus to explore more. After walking through campus a little bit, I decided to sketch the civil engineering building. It is one of the coolest buildings I’ve ever seen, and I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s made mostly of concrete, but the façade has steel pillars that start out as one, and then branch off into two or three in the top half of the building. Im not sure if those serve any structural purpose, since there are concrete pillars placed at even intervals which seem to be doing most of the structural work. It was just a really interesting building, that probably makes the engineering students that attend classes there stop and think. Thinking back to Hitchcock, which is home of the civil engineering department, why can’t we have a building as cool as the one at San Joaquin? Hitchcock is a run of the mill building from the 1960’s, with a basic layout and brick façade. It would be nice if at some point Ohio State could redo Hitchcock, because as the main engineering building, it should fascinate the students that go there, and force them to think about the building in terms of what they learn in class. Similar to how Knowlton does this for its students. Overall, it was a really interesting campus.
The engineering building there was so cool! I totally agree with you…I wish that Hitchcock had more architectural appeal. I think that it’s very important for a structure to have a lot of natural light for occupants because physiologically it improves moods and efficiency. Hitchcock lacks many windows in the classrooms and sometimes it feels like you’re in a cave or something! Also in terms of sustainability, I bet that Hitchcock is a nightmare in terms of its energy consumption. Those buildings in San Jaqouin seemed so much more energy efficienct…especially the Innovation Center! Great sketch of the exterior of the building! I found those columns to be so interesting because they were at different angles! The different angles reminded me of the columns/beams at the Museum of Memory that we visited today! Structurally I think that the different angles are very appealing architecturally, but structurally I think that they are very good because loads can be distributed throughout the building more efficiently and if one section of the column fails, then this “diagrid” system may prevent the entire system from failing. Very cool observations!! I hope you get very rich someday and fund a project to demolish the attrocity that is Hitchcock Hall to create a new beautiful civil engineering called Collins Hall! 🙂