Graduate Assistantship

By Laura Thomas

Last fall I started my graduate assistantship with Shannon Sanders McDonald. Shannon is a new professor and a licensed architect in Illinois, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Maryland and is NCARB certified. The majority of her built work was when she was working for firms in the Chicago area at which time she turned her attention to writing the book, The Parking Garage, published by the urban land institute.

During Fall 2011, she taught our Graduate Studio ARC 551-Comprehensive Architectural Design as well as ARC 481-Environmental Design. Currently in Spring 2012, she is teaching Senior Studio ARC 452-Integration Studio. While she has a broad spectrum of interests from urban planning to parking garages, her focus has been on transportation, especially Personal Rapid Transit systems, three dimensional elevators and new mobility devices.

I started off my assistantship creating databases for her to aid in finding resources to continuing writing journal articles. These databases included Automated Parking Garages, New Mobility Devices, Personal Rapid Transit, Urban n Spatial Planning, and a database of Journals that she can submit articles to.

More recently however my research has been focused on the railways of Illinois. Where they still exist, where they have been abandoned and where train depot are located. I've also researched where all of the barge depots are to see how they relate to the train lines. The third main element to consider in the web of transportation infrastructure are the interstate and highways. The purpose behind this research is to see where, if any in this web of train, rivers, and roads, opportunities exist to reconnect the population with old and new ways of transportation.

University of Illinois has millions of dollars in grant money to further research and develop new transportation strategies, focusing on St. Louis. Doesn't U of I know that this is Saluki territory? Hopefully this research will be the beginnings of creating a base for SIU to take the grant money from U of I and increase our transportation department here on campus.

This research is interesting and something that we as architects need to be aware of in doing urban planning. We must realize that population density in large cities is only going to increase and providing parking or other means of transit for the masses is going to be an increased concern for architects and city planners.