It’s Kirill again. This year, Hana and I are studying abroad in Denmark for a year, our 4th year at Cal Poly Pomona B.Arch program. Necils is in Pomona in his 4th year also. Tom transferred schools to SF state last admission cycle and now studies environmental science.
Right before leaving to Denmark, we got the amphitheater plans back from the building dept. They passed the planning dept. review, but got handed back to us with a fair amount of comments from the building department.
Immediately after getting to Denmark, I started working on the kickstarter campaign to raise funds for the engineering and construction of the shipping container structure. This prompted me to draw a lot of schematic drawings explaining the project and the design decisions, which I am thankful to have now.
Soon after, the Engineers without Borders UCSD chapter responded to an application we submitted with the help of Arturo more than a year ago. We finally got in touch with them, and the engineers without borders are going to undertake the engineering of the shipping container structure. The team is composed of UCSD students Ali Ismail, Jackie First, and Ashwin Kannan guided by professor Fariborz Tehrani from CSU Fullerton.
The team agreed to draw the grading plan, and the electrical plan for the shade structure so that we can submit the amphitheater as well as the shade structure. At this stage I am almost done with revisions for the shade structure drawings and I’m waiting on a few things from Roger from Precision Structural (framing plan, truss plate details, and solar mounting detail).
While I await the things from Roger, I will throw my time at finishing the kickstarter video (the last thing remaining to be completed) so that we can start fundraising for engineering funds for the engineering of the library. Regarding the library, I got in touch with Brad Mimlitz from Earth Wall Builders (http://www.earthwallbuilders.com) who built the rammed earth walls at the Festival of Arts in Laguna. We stumbled across the project the summer leaving to Denmark when celebrating my birthday, and it was the first rammed earth construction we saw in person. The quality was amazing and the wall rivaled concrete in stability. Brad connected us with his engineer, and he gave us a quote for $1000 for the engineering of the structure. We hope to raise sufficient funds in the next couple months for both the construction of the shipping container structure as well as the engineering of the library structure to begin the engineering and final construction documents for the library.
Brad also came to the site, met with Maria, and took a soil sample to sift it and test its compressive strength. He said that the soil had a lot of fine particles, making it problematic to have the same compressive strength as concrete. It looks like an aggregate would need to be used to make the soil stable enough. The color is fantastic though.
