A model of the building project at it's current state. Courtesy photo

Architecture and environmental design senior David Lee sat at his desk in his architecture studio on campus. It was after 11 p.m. and he would be there another two hours before going home.

Lee wasn’t up late so he could finish an assignment for school. He was answering e-mails regarding the Facebook group he started about two weeks ago, “Save our Downtown.” He says he gets about 100 e-mails a day.

Lee started “Save our Downtown” when retired architecture and environmental design professor Allan Cooper approached him about plans for a new 212,000-square-foot building, nearly five years in the works to be built in San Luis Obispo’s downtown area. The building, called Garden Street Terraces, will run along Marsh Street between Garden and Broad streets.

Lee started the Facebook group in response to the project which he and other Cal Poly architecture students are disgusted by, he said.

“We were completely appalled,” Lee said. “It’s too massive for downtown. Plus it’s not a good piece of architecture, anyways.”

In just two weeks, “Save our Downtown” has reached 1,722 members. Members of the group have been debating whether the building’s addition to San Luis Obispo’s downtown area will be a good thing.

Garden Street Terraces is a “mixed-use development” that will include a 95-room hotel, 21,000-square-feet of commercial retail space, a 14,000-square-foot neighborhood market and apartments. Downtown Brewing Company, the Smith building and the Laird building on Garden Street and San Luis Traditions on Marsh Street will all be retrofitted as a result of the project. Two of the buildings on the block will be demolished.

The project’s website claims the building will stay within the city’s 75-foot height cap. But some members of the community, including Lee, are not convinced this is enough.

“Imagine you come downtown to sit at Linnaea’s and have a coffee and here’s this enormous building in front of you,” Lee said. “Is this the kind of feeling you want when you go downtown in SLO? There’s a reason people like this city so much — it’s small and has a unique feel to it. This would change all of that.”

One worker at Linnaea’s Cafe, across the street from where the Garden Street Terraces will be, said the people at Linnaea’s are hoping the addition to the street won’t affect their ability to run a successful local business. 

“We like that all of the local businesses in this area help each other out and try to have each others’ backs,” she said. “I don’t think this will affect our business too much, and I think we’re all keeping a positive attitude about this project.”

In addition to changing the “feel of San Luis Obispo,” members of “Save our Downtown” have expressed other concerns about the project. Some of the problems they have with the proposed structure are the shadows it will cast on surrounding buildings such as Linnaea’s. Also, some members of the group said the size and placement of the building will cause a draft tunnel.

Anytime you have a street or alleyway with large buildings on either side of it, this creates a wind tunnel, Lee said. When you have buildings of this size in a row it creates this effect, which will cause a draft along downtown.

Architecture junior Tiffany Carlson said she understands the city’s desire to create a way to increase tourism and revenue but thinks the project could take on a less obtrusive size.

“This is an irresponsible plan. San Luis Obispo and the downtown area are visited and loved because of the small town, casual feel, (which) is a break from many other cities in this state,” Carlson said. “If we start building bigger and taller, which will be the inevitable result of this project, we will destroy exactly what it is that draws in tourists in the first place. Imagine going to Farmers’ Market in a cold shadowy wind tunnel created by seven-story buildings on both sides. I promise it won’t be a very pleasant Thursday experience.”

According to “Save our Downtown,” at approximately 74 feet, the Garden Street Terrace building will be the biggest building downtown, surpassing the Wineman Hotel and the parking structures located on Palm and Marsh streets.

However, members of the firm responsible for the project said “Save Our Downtown” is too biased and is not presenting the facts of the project fairly to the public.

Isaac Greenetz is a local architect and works for WestPac Investments, the firm in charge of the Garden Street Terraces project. San Luis Obispo has a lot to gain from the addition of this building to the downtown area including revenue from tourism and a great place for people to live and work, he said.

Greenetz said he wants to see the “Save our Downtown” do a better job at telling the public about the project. In a diagram “Save our Downtown” posted, the Garden Street Terrace building is the largest pictured, surpassing the Palm Street parking structure. According to Greenetz, the Garden Street Terrace building will not be the largest building downtown and the diagram is misleading.

“The group is very biased against the project,” Greenetz said. “This is not the tallest building downtown. The Anderson building, Palm Street parking structure and AT&T building are all bigger. It’s very easy to make those renderings look very large, but the concern of the height is very uninformed.”

The city’s 75-foot height cap is judged on an area’s average height he said, which in the case of the Palm Street parking structure allows for some buildings to be even taller than 75 feet from the base of the building.

Only parts of the building will come to close to the height cap, Greenetz said. The rest of the building’s design is terraced, so the roof gets farther from the street as you go up in stories. This will create less of a shadow over downtown than the original proposed project.

“This absolutely will not change the feel of SLO,” Greenetz said. “This is a large building, but it’s not some giant tower looming over downtown.”

Other community members have joined the Facebook group to show their support for the project, saying that Garden Street Terrace will not change the feeling of the downtown area.

Khaldoon Khaireddin, an architecture and environmental design senior, said he doesn’t think the project will ruin anything about downtown and will increase the value of the area.

“As it is now, Garden Street is not a pleasant place to be; it’s run-down and dark,” Khaireddin said. “Filling in that back alley with new housing would actually rejuvenate the street.”

Several people in support of the project are looking forward to the financial impact the project will have on the city.

This is why this project is so important to San Luis Obispo, Greenetz said.

“Right now in our economic time, to have a developer come and build something like this is going to help downtown become great. We’re bringing more people and revenue to the area,” Greenetz said.

Supporters of the group realize there is a financial benefit to the building, Lee said. The group is pushing for the plans to be made smaller and for people to think about the effect the structure will have on San Luis Obispo in the future, he said.

“This building is going to happen,” Lee said. “If we allow something to be built at this size, where are we going to draw the line?”

Lee and other supporters of “Save our Downtown” plan to tell the city council why they think this project is a bad idea and to propose alternatives to the current plans. They will speak at the city council meeting June 1 from 4 to 6 p.m.

It will be up to the council to make the final requirements for the project based on recommendations from the city planning commission, said Tyler Corey, the official responsible for overseeing the project.

“There are negatives and positives to this project,” Corey said. “As of now I think the planning commission agrees that it is a little too tall, a little out of character (for SLO’s downtown),” Corey said. “We are going to ask for more adjustments but we have a much better project than what it started as.”

A model of the building project at it's current state.

Courtesy Image

Graduating architecture students will put their hard work on display this weekend at the seventh annual Fifth Year Architecture Thesis Show in Chumash Auditorium.

The show begins with an opening reception at 5 p.m. on Friday and continues Saturday and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Each of the 157 students will have their own design station with displays of drawings, 3D models and rendered images they created in the studio during their Senior Architecture Design Thesis class. The three-quarter long course is required for all architecture seniors and is the first time the graduating students could create their own design projects.

“Students would identify a problem in architecture, find the full complexities and create a thesis statement on how to fix it,” said architecture professor and event coordinator Barry Williams.

The thesis project is the capstone project of the students’ experience at Cal Poly and the center pieces of a portfolio, Tracee de Hahn, Assistant Director of Advancement, said. The thesis project lets students figure out if they have picked a problem too big to solve or if they need to expand an idea, she said.

“Any studio project is learning by doing,” she said. “The thesis project is the students’ own approach to a problem. It teaches them how to start projects they will pursue in the future.”

The thesis project has constantly been in the back of architecture students’ minds since freshman or sophomore year, architecture senior Susan Lam said.

“I started to think about my project before fall quarter but my ideas changed once I started the class,” she said. “I’ve created a project that incorporates art in all aspects of life: living, working and playing.”

The event is open to the public. In the past, most attendees have been parents of architecture students, architecture firms and Cal Poly architecture alumni, Williams said. A lot of people outside the department come to enjoy the model drawings and the creativity, he said.

“A universal thought of the parents after they see the work is, ‘Now I understand why my son or daughter never came home and why they were asking for so much money,’” he said.

The show is also a place where students have been hired in the past, Williams said. Architects from firms such as Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) and BAR Architects are usually hiring and come to the event to talk to students, he said.

“Quite often in the past professionals will come to the show and look at a project,” he said. “There have been several instances where professionals have put business cards on projects asking students to contact them.”

Architecture students will be available to talk to about projects; monitors from each studio will help explain projects to interested people.

The entire show, which costs about $10,000 to host, is self-supported, Williams said.

There will also be a Fifth Year Landscape Architecture Thesis Show June 4 and 5 on Higuera Street.

Architecture senior Dion Dekker integrated shipping containers for the Modular Building Institute's Miami Beach Hotel student design competition. Courtesy image

Cal Poly architecture senior Dion Dekker designed a North Miami Beach hotel built partly of shipping containers to win a Modular Building Institute (MBI) student design competition.

Last quarter, Dekker’s architectural design class submitted modular designs to MBI for the hotel, which will be built in North Miami Beach, Florida. A jury of architecture authorities evaluated the submissions for innovative ideas that would reinvent the modular design industry.

Dekker was awarded $7,225 at a ceremony at World of Modular, MBI’s annual convention and tradeshow. Two other Cal Poly architecture students, Thomas Paul Shorey and Michael Charter, both won honorable mentions.

This year, the contest was administered by the American Institute of Architecture Students (AIAS); Director of Design Matthew Fochs directed the competition and oversaw the jury.

“The modular architecture industry has become very stagnant and focused on utility rather than innovation,” Fochs said. “This competition really encourages students to show how they think modular design can evolve, which is exactly what the industry is looking for.”

The Miami Beach Hotel competition required students to come up with a sustainable design for a modular structure. This means a design for a room or small part of a building that can be repeated throughout the whole building, which allows a construction company to save money and build the components off-site.

Dekker’s class was given the assignment a few weeks into winter quarter by architecture professor Thomas Fowler, who said he looks for national architecture competitions that relate to what his students are learning. Fowler chose the MBI contest last quarter because he said it challenged the class to think outside the box. He also added his own twist to the competition requirements.

“I changed the parameters of the competition for the class this quarter by making old shipping containers one of the required components. They’re so common today and have so much architectural potential, especially for sustainable construction,” he said.

Dekker said the inspiration for his design was the idea of an exoskeleton made out of the shipping containers that would surround the hotel rooms and restaurants.

The MBI jury found the idea ingenious as a modular component and environmentally friendly. They were also very impressed with Dekker’s exoskeleton design.

“I wanted to create a design that was different throughout the hotel, but the basic room structure would only need to be altered slightly,” Dekker said. “I thought the idea of an exoskeleton would allow for that, but it did take a while to really narrow down the idea.”

Students electronically submitted detailed designs along with a narrative description. Fowler said electronic submission required students to be a lot more creative with their work.

“Because the jury decides winners by looking at the submissions online, students really have to be able to tell the story of their design with whatever they submit,” Fowler said. “Dion’s submission was very compelling and convincing, which I think really impressed the jury.”

Fochs said designs like Dekker’s make it clear how much more effort architecture students are putting into their designs.

“Today’s architecture students seem to be doing a lot more research and focusing a lot more on the details of their designs,” Fochs said. “Employers in the architecture industry are pleased to see designs like Mr. Dekker’s.”

Dekker said he’s just happy to be able to put the award on his résumé and is already moving on to another competition. Last week he submitted a reconfigured version of his design for a competition that requires students to explore the possibilities of steel in architecture.

“It’s obviously a really great honor to win a competition like this, but there’s always something new to focus on — another competition, another project,” Dekker said.

Courtesy graphic

Culture might not be the first thing that comes to mind when you think of architecture, but in Cal Poly senior John Vierra’s designs, it comes first. From strolling down the streets of China and Japan to playing with a slinky, the architecture student has found inspiration for his award-winning furniture and floating boathouse design in culture.

“What you think architecture is, it really isn’t. It challenges you because it has social implications to it and can influence people as they experience a building. It’s a lot different from even what I thought it was,” Vierra said. “We have to respond to the mainstream and what is happening today, and it kind of influences you in a way to constantly be aware of culture and society.”

Vierra’s culture-consciousness might be one of the factors that helped him win first place in the 2009 Bohemian Flats Boathouse Student Design Competition, which required competitors to design a boathouse for the Bohemian Flats, a bank on the Mississippi River in Minneapolis.

Vierra was awarded $2,500 for his “Boat on Board” design by the American Institute of Architecture Students (AIAS) and the Vinyl Institute, which sponsored the event. The models were evaluated on the materials used and innovation of a sustainable and safe design.

When approaching the project, Vierra consulted with Cal Poly architecture lecturer Margarida Yu Hui Yin. Yin has taught Vierra in four courses.

“He deserves all of his success,” Yin said. “I won’t be surprised when I see his design works published in major architecture magazines, because I am so sure that he will have a bright future in his architectural profession.”

As a young architect, Vierra said what he loved most about the field was its seemingly endless opportunities. “When I chose architecture, I liked the wide range of opportunities for what you can produce. You can go from furniture to large scale designs to interior designs,” he said.

His favorite project yet was a bench entitled “tsunami” that transforms into three different seats. It won “Best in Show” in the 2009 Vellum/CAED Furniture Competition & Exhibition that took place at Cal Poly last fall.

“I picked a star slinky because when you twist the slinky, it creates different forms with the different degrees, so my bench is actually a normal bench that you could rotate the pieces,” Vierra said. “So as you rotate, what was once the support for the leg is now the support for your back.”

The piece helped Vierra come up with the theme “transformalism,” which he would later use for his studio. He based this concept on the way he believes architecture influences and engages people.

Cal Poly architecture senior James Ross has known Vierra for two years and accompanied him to China. He said Vierra’s time management and determination have led his peers to regard him highly for his success.

“He is willing to help out by giving me tips, pointers and critiques,” Ross said. “I look toward my teachers and peers, and he is always someone I take into consideration.”

Vierra said while the college workload is hectic and architecture students do not have much free time, more students should get involved in competitions to make themselves stand out in an already competitive field.

“I am a self-motivated student, and I like to challenge myself and set goals. And it’s just kind of fun doing competitions,” Vierra said.

In recent years, the field of architecture has encountered some big issues — from city to climate change, to a troubled economy and the implosion of the real estate market, to controversial trends in technology and design.

This year, the Hearst Lecture Series hosted by the College of Architecture and Environmental Design focuses on the issue of integrated design practices.

The five-lecture series will explore the integration between the digital and the physical, said series director and assistant professor of architecture Mark Cabrinha.

The series, which began on Jan. 15 and will run until Feb. 26, will bring in national experts from across the United States to discuss integrated design.

With the increased need for technology from the 1990s to today, the relationship between conception and execution has been severed through the separation of means and methods, Cabrinha said.

“Consequently, software is seen as the culprit or the solution rather than the question at hand,” he said.

Architecture students generally agree with Cabrinha’s view on integrated design.

“I feel integrated design is important because digital tools aid in the prefabrication,” architecture junior Nathan Kiatkulpiboone said. “Nowadays, it’s not simply the idea or design that is important but also how accessible it is and how does it affect the environment. If we can improve manufacturing practices, we can provide a product that promotes efficiency.”

The first lecturer to address these issues was Benjamin Ball. Ball is a partner in the Los Angeles-based integrated design and fabrication practice Ball-Nogues Studio.

Kiatkulpiboone found Ball’s speech interesting based on the importance Ball placed on the integration of factory development and design production.

“His designs began as sketches that were digitally translated into shapes and parts,” Kiatkulpiboone said. “Once the digital work was completed, designs were taken to a fabricator who made every piece. Because all of this was planned in advance, construction time was only a few hours.”

The last lecture featured architect Michael Hughes. Hughes is an associate professor of architecture at the University of Arkansas. He believes in the importance of grounding design education in hands-on experience. Hughes has won numerous state and regional design awards and is currently working on an outdoor classroom for a local elementary school.

The free public lectures are made possible through a grant from the Hearst Foundation series, Cabrinha said.

“There was a time when only local people could come without funding,” he said.

Students agree on the importance of the lecture series, now in its fifth year, as an additional component to their studio time.

“The Hearst Lecture series, in my opinion, is one of the greatest parts of Cal Poly’s architecture program,” architecture senior Nema Ashjay said. “Having professionals come in to speak to us establishes a strong connection between education and the industry we plan to be a part of. We have a chance to see the type of work we do in our studios be actually realized.”

A Cal Poly professor recently won the Creative Achievement Award from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) for his work and development of the Collaborative Integrative- Interdisciplinary Digital- Design Studio (CIDS) on campus.

Professor Thomas Fowler began expanding the studio in 2000 from what had been nothing more than a computer lab since its start in 1997. Now, room 207 in the Architecture and Environmental Design building is a place where Fowler can meet with CIDS students to discuss projects they may be working on.

“I had the idea of evolving the computer lab and integrating community projects into the course work. I feel strongly about the students I teach being involved in real projects with design and building. It’s an important part of learning,” Fowler said.

CIDS is an integrative program that allows junior, senior, independent study and work study student participants. The program brings together architecture students as well as students from other disciplines to collaborate on projects. The goal is to teach students how to work in teams and communicate with people who specialize in other areas of a project to create a final product.

“At first, students seem to get frustrated by having to work with other disciplines, but eventually they get used to the idea and learn to work well in teams,” Fowler said.

The CIDS students have been involved with several projects around the community. A past team of more than 100 built an inflatable structure out of a quarter mile of plastic. The structure acted as a nomadic theater that took at least three weeks to develop and one to assemble.

Currently, a team of CIDS students is working with the housing authority here in San Luis Obispo on a project called Housing Opportunity through Modular Environments (HOME). Students are working with professionals to create a single room occupancy development to function as transitional housing.

The design team from HOME asked CIDS to collaborate. In fact, the project title and acronym for HOME was thought up by a Cal Poly student.

“Because they’re still students, a lot of their ideas are more forward-thinking than those of people who are already in the field, so (the design team) was interested in getting the opinion of many different kinds of students and getting their involvement and ideas on how to realize this project,” Fowler said.

The HOME project has been in the works since June 2009 and is scheduled to be built within the next two years.

Andrew Goodwin, a Cal Poly alumnus and former architecture major worked within the program as an independent study student who participated in design competitions. Goodwin, who now works for RA Architects in San Luis Obispo, commented on Fowler’s “unique” approach to teaching.

“He’s well-known by students in the college of architecture for going above and beyond his eight-to-five duties as a teacher. He gave students like me the opportunity to investigate through competition. Now that I’m in the field, that is the best way to fully investigate design,” Goodwin said.

Fowler brings in representatives from Liberal Arts and Engineering Studies (LAES), professors from other concentrations such as landscape architecture and civil engineering, and professionals who work in the field. They often guest lecture to his classes and look at student projects to give them ideas, critiques and tips.

“Hearing something from someone other than a professor or teacher can be really important to students. Getting professional insight on what they’re learning in school and how it connects to what they will be doing outside of school can be uplifting,” Fowler said.

The CIDS program continues to focus on real-world experiences for its students. Some of their projects can be seen on an outdoor display in front of the Architecture building.

“It draws more attention,” Fowler said. “I always tell my students that they need to find ways to present what they’re doing to anyone they meet. They need to find a way to tell their stories in a compelling manner so that anyone of any discipline can understand and appreciate it.”

On receiving the awards, Fowler said that he submitted a portfolio to ACSA of projects that had been done by the group over the years, along with an updated résumé. He said that although confident, his expectations weren’t high since most programs no matter how outstanding, don’t generally hear anything back at all.

Fowler will receive the award at the ACSA Annual Meeting in New Orleans on March 5.

“Just teaching and not having this component would be boring. Whether it’s a quick design or a more long-term project, this way there is always a level of real involvement for my students,” he said.