Paper Authors

Abstract

NOTE: The first page of text has been automatically extracted and included below in lieu of an abstract

Project Managers, Architects and Engineers, Oh My: An Interdisciplinary Collaboration Abstract

The Architectural Engineering (ARCE) Program at the California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo is creating a unique and novel interdisciplinary course where architecture, architectural engineering and construction management students collaborate to design and plan the construction of a building structure. The current plan is to develop a default interdisciplinary experience that can be taken by every student and then allow course substitutions for other options as they are created. This paper reports on one of those other options, specifically a unique real world, global, multi-disciplinary experience in East Africa that has resulted from a master’s degree project that incorporated 14 undergraduates into the work. The project is entering its second year, now includes 24 undergraduate students and has the potential to continue well into the future. The students are supporting the Catholic diocese in Same, Tanzania to design a polytechnic school to accommodate up to 500 students. The design experience is allowing students to address the social, political, economic, constructability, and global issues that come from a real world project on a different continent. The students are incorporating local labor capabilities, regional material availability, climate, seismic vulnerabilities, and local customs and traditions into their design. To minimize the costs of construction, operation and maintenance, the student design includes efficient construction methods, energy sustainability and water sustainability.

I. Introduction

The Architectural Engineering (ARCE) Program at the California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo is housed in the College of Architecture and Environmental Design (CAED) which makes it one of the few accredited engineering programs located outside of a college of engineering. With the Architecture (ARCH) and Construction Management (CM) programs located within the same college, there is a wonderful and unique opportunity for students to engage in interdisciplinary collaboration with those same design industry professions that they will encounter on real world projects. To that end, the ARCE students take four design studios from the Architecture Department and multiple courses from the CM department to attain the proficiency required by the ABET ARCE program criteria. Similarly, both the Architecture and CM students take a five course sequence in structures from the ARCE Department. What is currently lacking is an upper division, interdisciplinary, project-based design experience for every student. The college is committed to creating such an experience for the benefit of every student.

ABET criterion 3d 1 requires that “students are able to function on multi-disciplinary teams”. A multi-disciplinary team does not truly exist until each individual member of a team possesses some specialized knowledge that the other members do not have. A priority goal for the ARCE program is to create a unique and novel interdisciplinary course where architecture, architectural engineering and construction management students collaborate to design and plan the construction of a building structure. The course objectives are for students to be able to:

• Citation

• Format
  • APA
  • APA - LaTeX bibitem
  • MLA
  • MLA - LaTeX bibitem
  • Bibtex
  • EndNote - RIS

Lambert, D., & Estes, A., & Baltimore, C. (2009, June), Project Managers, Architects, And Engineers Oh My! An Interdisciplinary Collaboration Paper presented at 2009 Annual Conference & Exposition, Austin, Texas. 10.18260/1-2--4675