At 5:23 this afternoon Emeritus Professor Donna Duerk celebrated the close of her final quarter teaching at Cal Poly by slicing up a cake to share with her Arch 252 class.

This quarter’s theme, “The Green Machine” started with a design for a moon base and concluded with the design of a sustainable mixed use project in downtown San Luis Obispo.  Emphasis was also put on structural design of the projects.

Continue Reading »

It was 1970, the United Sates invaded Cambodia, the Beatles disbanded, and 14 Cal Poly Architecture students flooded building 21′s courtyard.

Cal Poly Architecture was very different in 1970.  The College of Architecture and Environmental Design was still two years away from being officially organized and the School of Architecture was headed by George Hasslein, latter he would be the founding dean of the college.  George was very involved with the students and faculty.  He prided himself on the wide variety of instructors that he recruited from around the world.   The Gallery Lab, or the Fish Bowl as it is known today, hadn’t been used by the college for Architecture classes before.  But, at the start of the school year Dean Hasslein was using any space available for labs and he assigned a group of 14 students to take an empty room and turn it into their studio space.

Gallery Lab, Class of '70: Skip Carlstrom, Gary Carsten, Bob Bradberry, Neil McCallum, Dennis Runyan, Jon Pugh, Dennis Bethel, J. Scott Carter, Bob Turbin, Ed Ebright, Rick Holden, Rich Kopecky, and Will Carlton. (Missing from photo are Dale Burrious, Larry Huntoon, Rich Byfield and Tom DeKleer.)

Continue Reading »

New LED Streetlights at the corner of Ygnacio Blvd. and Montego, Walnut Creek, CA

Driving home tonight I noticed LED streetlights emitting a soft white glow over parts of Ygnacio Blvd, here in Walnut Creek.  As of this evening the lights only extend the 3/4 mile stretch between N. Civic Dr. and Marchbanks Dr. and a couple random streetlights West of N. Civic Dr. and East of North Broadway.  Three quarters of a mile is not much considering Ygnacio Blvd. is over 7 miles long and is only one of several major streets in the city.

The lights emit a very natural cool white as opposed to the amber tint cast by the current high pressure sodium lights that are located throughout the rest of the city.  The benefits of LED are incredibly low energy consumption and a ridiculously long life time; 75,000+ hours compared to the 12,000 to 24,000 hours of high pressure sodium or 1,000 hours of an incandescent bulb.  However, due to the fact that they emit a white light, and therefore a broader spectrum of wavelengths, they do result in more light pollution.

Walnut Creek already has a policy in place to replace all of the traffic signals with LED lights (walnut-creek.org: Signals – LEDs and Battery Backup), however I found no mention on the cities web page of any plans to replace the streetlights.  The city already spent $1.46 million of Federal Stimulus dollars to resurface 1 mile of Civic Drive and it apparently gets an additional $677,000 for energy efficiency and conservation projects (Contra Costa Times 4/24/2009: Walnut Creek gets slice of stimulus pie).  Replacing streetlights with LEDs has been a popular use of stimulus money.  San Jose, Milwakee, and Missouri City, Texas are among the cities doing so (USA Today 3/3/2009: More cities tap stimulus package for LED streetlights).  Recovery.gov lists a few projects for Walnut Creek, including a contract for $58,615 with One Line Power Systems, Inc.  The company, located in Walnut Creek, has no website and I was unable to find any information about what the company does.

It is unclear at this time whether the US taxpayer is opening their wallet for our new street lights, but I for one, am happy for the new light being cast on our city.

UPDATE:  January 8th, 2010

As of today the city has replaced 126 fixtures stretching nearly two miles from Oakland Boulevard to Marchbanks Drive.

Almost two months after they were installed the Contra Costa Times finally reported yesterday that the city of Walnut Creek paid $87,000 for the install after receiving a $17,950 rebate from PG&E.   A PG&E spokesman said they were able to offer the rebate because of stimulus funding.  It also appears that PG&E hired the contractor to install the lights.

According to the Contra Costa Times the city’s energy savings have been dramatic.  The city is paying $726 $7,230 per month to power the new fixtures, down from $14,080 a month.  Energy usage decreased to 5,700 kwh, less than half the energy the original fixtures used.

UPDATE:  January 22nd, 2010

Thanks to grandcanyondave for providing a link to PGE’s current rate structure.  This give us a little more insight into the cost savings of switching to LED lights.  The following numbers show a typical scenario similar to what the city may have been paying previously and currently.

According to PGE’s current rates:

126 HPS 250 watt fixtures x $0.567 x 200 hours/month = $14,288/month

126 LED 150 watt fixtures x $0.295 x 200 hours/month = $7,434/month

According to grandcanyondave the city previously had a mix of 125 and 250 High Pressure Sodium fixtures, and 200 hours/month is a little low if it is late in the year, however I think these numbers help give an idea of the cost associated with street lighting.

TurboSquid, the online digital content site issued an announcement this morning about a new deal with Autodesk® making TurboSquid the exclusive marketplace provider for Autodesk Seek.

Currently all the content on Seek is free.  I have a couple of Revit families on TurboSquid but my sales have come nowhere close to compensating for the time and effort put into their creation.  For content creators this good news because it will hopefully increase exposure of the content given that Seek search is built into Autodesk’s products.  There are still a lot of questions like if TurboSquid’s content will be integrated into Seek’s search results or if there will just be a link saying something like “more content here.”

We should know more after Autodesk’s official announcement.

TurboSquid’s announcement is below:

TurboSquid has some exciting news — today we signed a major agreement with Autodesk to benefit our sellers. TurboSquid has been named as Autodesk® Seek’s exclusive marketplace provider for the purchase of user-generated 3D content. TurboSquid will provide marketplace services for 3ds Max, Revit, Maya, Softimage, AutoCAD, Mudbox and other Autodesk application files.

We’re so excited about the opportunities this agreement will offer that we wanted to share the news with you right away. We’ll make an official announcement with Autodesk in the next few weeks.

Matt Wisdom | Chief Executive Officer | TurboSquid.com