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Central Coast Market Report
Building activity is brisk on the campus of Cal Poly San Luis Obispo
By Greg Aragon
With four large nonhousing projects totaling more than $200 million on the runway, construction at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo College is preparing for takeoff.
One of the biggest and most exciting of the projects is the $71 million Recreation Center Expansion, which will add about 75,000 sq ft of basketball and volleyball courts and other sports facilities to the school’s existing 90,000-sq-ft recreation center.
The project is currently in design development and should break ground in the fall and take two years to complete. Cannon Design of Los Angeles and is the architect and Sundt Construction of Tempe, Ariz. is the contractor on a construction management-at-risk contract.
The existing facility will remain open during the expansion, says Steve Van Loan, Sundt project director.
“There will be kids in the weight room, on treadmills and in the pools, so trying to work around this will be a challenge,” he says. “We’ll have a thousand eyes watching over us.”
Van Loan says because students imposed a fee on themselves to help pay for part of the expansion, the project would not be affected by state budget cuts.
The same can’t be said for the largest of the four projects, the $124 million Center for Science, which is about 95% through design but was recently delayed due to the California budget crises.
Johan M. Uyttewaal, director of building and design for Cal Poly, says the project is on hold because it is financed by general obligation bonds, which the state has stopped issuing.
“We were ready to go out to bid in April, but now we have to wait for the Legislature to act,” says Uyttewaal. “As soon as we get the go-ahead from the state, we will be ready to bid two months after, but right now it is suspended and we don’t know for how long.
The CM at risk on the science center project is Los Angeles-based Gilbane and the architect/engineer is Zimmer Gunsul and Frasca of San Jose. The project involves replacement of Cal Poly’s Science Building No. 52 with a more modern facility, providing 185,800 sq ft of new lecture and laboratory space and faculty offices for the College of Science and Math.
Another important project is the $5.7 million Technology Park, which will provide 20,000 sq ft of research space available for lease.
The design-build project, which broke ground in January, is being funded by both private and federal money. The steel-frame structure is being built by Rarig Construction of San Luis Obispo and is scheduled for completion in May 2010.
“The intent is to have about five or six [outside] firms rent out the space and then interact with our own campus research,” Uyttewaal says.
Cal Poly’s fourth large project is the $2.9 million Simpson Strong-Tie Materials Demonstration Laboratory, which will provide about 7,000 sq ft of open-bay lab space for construction management department in the College of Architecture and Environmental Design.
“Part of what we tried to accomplish with this building was to demonstrate different structural systems for the students,” says Al Hauck, construction management department head. “For example, the labs don’t have acoustical ceiling, so you can see the electrical mechanical systems in the ceiling space.”
Hauck says the Simpson lab will be a heavy timber brace-frame building, which will illustrate to students how the use of a renewable material such as wood can be used in construction.
“This building will demonstrate the whole supply chain, from the producer of the timber, to the manufacturer of the timber members, to the engineering and architecture of the building, to final construction using renewable materials,” Hauck adds.
Designed by Omni Design Group Inc. of San Luis Obispo, the project is scheduled to break ground in May, at which time a contractor will be selected.
Poly Canyon Village Eyes Fall Completion
Phase 2 of the $300 million student housing project on the Cal Poly SLO campus, Poly Canyon Village, is expected to be open by the fall.
Clark Design/Build of California, Inc. of Oakland is the general contractor on the project and Niles Bolton Associates of Atlanta and Anderson Brule Architects of San Jose are the designers. Brookwood Program Management of Atlanta is the program manager.
When complete, Poly Canyon Village will feature nine residence buildings with 2,677 beds and two parking structures with over 1,900 spaces on 30 acres north of Brizzolara Creek. The complex also will include retail and food service space, and a recreation center with a swimming pool.
“The size of the project offers Cal Poly a unique opportunity to create a 21st-century living and learning community for our student body,” says Cal Poly President Warren J. Baker.
Baker adds that the campus master plan calls on the university to house one-third of its students on campus. California State University system-wide revenue bonds financed the project.
The first phase, which opened last fall, included 1,541 beds.
Poly Canyon Village will be the first LEED-certified New Construction project on the Cal Poly campus and will be the largest LEED certified project in the California State University system. Green elements include a storm water system, 30% less water use, operable windows and natural ventilation, 75% recycled construction waste, use of low VOC materials and daylight and views from 90% of the occupied space.
Poly Canyon Village is comprised of three neighborhoods, driven by topographic, geographic and social considerations. Each of the neighborhoods features passive outdoor gathering spaces framed by buildings and landscaping. All student residence buildings contain common lobbies with services and intimate study areas intended to provide an array of learning and social opportunities.
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Construction Management Gains Traction at Cal Poly SLO’s New Construction Innovations Center
Thanks to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo’s new $33 million Construction Innovations Center, students enrolled in construction management courses have 30,000 sq ft of new learning space.
Opened in October, the facility was built because the construction management department, which is part of the College of Architecture and Environmental Design at Cal Poly, was crowded in an existing 13,000-sq-ft of space, says Al Hauck, department head for Construction Management.
“We had the highest percentage of usage in labs, and as we doubled in size over the years, the facility stayed the same,” he says. “We were packed on top of one another.”
Featuring seven labs, 12 classrooms, lecture halls, faculty offices, and headquarters for the California Center for Construction Education, the three-story building accommodates about 400 students from primarily California, Oregon, Washington and the western United States.
The structure was built by Straub Construction of San Diego, and was designed and engineered by San Diego-based Austin Veum Robbins Partners.
Hauck says the facility is suited for the construction management department’s focus on “integrated curriculum.” He said this type of curriculum “challenges the conventional model of university education that [says] you take a body of knowledge and divided it up into three credit hour lecture courses” and take each one at a time.
“But integrated curriculum, which has been around the last 10 to 20 years, says that the only way to really learn this stuff is to get immersed into a problem-based curriculum based on the understanding of major projects,” says Hauck.
He says Cal Poly students get assigned major projects in their own private dedicated labs for the entire college quarter.
“They have an office and a desk within that space, where they tackle a major commercial, civil, or housing project from start to finish,” he says.
“So rather than having a separate, stand-alone course in contracts, estimating, scheduling, methods, or materials, they are integrating all that into one of these large credit-hour seminars and learning it within that context,” says Hauck. “It is sort of throwing [the students] in the deep end, but construction is something you can’t master out of a text book; you have to have done it.”
Although the students may sometimes feel all alone, they are always under the wings of one of 13 full-time construction management instructors, who each have about 15 years of experience in the construction industry.
Hauck says the program is so successful that the department “virtually runs its own [employment] placement office.”
“We have 150 companies a year coming to recruit our students,” he says. “And each week we have five contractors who conduct an information session and then set up interviews with our students.”
-- Greg Aragon
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