The Concrete Project

Tuesday, April 28 was a busy day in the Quigley courtyard! ARC 362 (Structures II) students were busy pouring their concrete beams for testing next week. Professor Robert H. Swenson has taught this course for many years and includes hands-on learning activities for the students.

Athena Sandravelis (L) and Shane Healey (R) have built their forms, placed the tension reinforcing, and are ready to begin the pouring of the concrete.

Here is a closer view of the beam design.

After allowing the concrete to cure for seven days, the students will load their beam designs and test them to determine how strong their creations are.

Students Yuko Aoki and Andrew Bevis work on their beam design. Talk about an international project! Yuko is from Japan and Andrew was raised right here in Jackson County, Illinois!

Fun in Studio!

Junior Dan Corte enjoys a McGangbang in studio. The McGangbang, invented at Daytona Beach, Florida, is a combination of a double cheeseburger and the spicy McChicken sandwich from McDonald's. Place the entire chicken sandwich between the cheeseburger's patties, open wide, and enojy! Perhaps we should place defibrillators in studio, just in case?

Construction Tour: The View Baptist Church

A regular feature of Building Technology courses at SIUC is a site visit. This spring, ARC 342: Building Technology III (Steel), visited the construction site of The View Baptist Church in Carbondale, Illinois.

The church was designed by Architect Thad Heckman of DesignWorks in Carbondale. Mr. Heckman teaches one of the three lab sections of ARC 342 this spring. The 18,000 sf church building replaces the original First Baptist Church in downtown Carbondale. Those familiar with the building know it as the large stone Romanesque Revival building with the rose windows. As you can see in the image above, Mr. Heckman paid homage to the original church design in the forms used for the new church.

The spire on the northwest corner of the building points toward the original location of First Baptist in downtown Carbondale. The new church building is located on South Giant City Road. The original stained glass windows of the church have been transplanted and used in the new building, as shown in the image below.

The sanctuary of the new church is tuned to the acoustics of the human voice. The SIUC School of Music will present a choir performance in June in the sanctuary.

Thanks to Thad Heckman for arranging and guiding ARC 342 students through the church!

Time to Test the Structures!

An annual highlight of Architecture 362: Structures II is the testing of the wood structures designed and built by students. Working in teams of two, students must construct a support that spans a 4'-0" circle and that carries 150# of bricks. Doesn't sound so hard, does it? Well, the challenge is that only one 2x4 may be used to design the structure. In the image above, Adam Burant and Brandon Garnett have loaded their structure with a point load. Below, they are weighing their structure. Bonus points were available for the team with the lightest structure that survived the loading.

In addition to surviving the bricks placed as a point load, the structure was also loaded with the same weight as a uniform load. Several students' structures survived both loads, and in some cases, also survived having the students themselves stand on their structure!

Architecture 362 is taught by Associate Professor Bob Swenson, who took the images used here.