UNIVERSITY PROFILE
PRECAST CONCRETE STUDIO ALLOWS STUDENTS FREEDOM TO CHOOSE PROJECTS FOUNDATION PROGRAMS
BY MARTY MCINTYRE, PCI FOUNDATION In a typical design studio, the students are assigned a project, given a program, and allowed to choose a material. When the PCI Foundation paired with assistant director and clinical assistant professor Philip Horton and clinical associate professor Warren Murff at Arizona State University (ASU) and Tpac Architectural and Structural Precast Concrete (an EnCon company), the teaching team decided to turn things around on the students.
The students kick off the semester with a research exercise, looking at material on the standard precast concrete “kit of parts.” They also have a chance to explore some case studies of precast concrete projects from around the world. At the same time, the students spend time at the Tpac plant in Phoenix and engage with professionals from the precast concrete industry who visit the students in the studio.
Current Projects on View
Jason Lien, EnCon United executive vice president, meets with Christina Lufkin, Emily Kellogg, and Susan Liu, ASU architecture students in the ADE 421 design studio to help the students develop the precast concrete elements of their studio project. Photo: Philip Horton.
The plant tour allows students to see familiar projects and begin to understand the scale and complexity of precast concrete. “One of the cooler things we saw was the rebar for a tub section being formed up while we were there,” says Horton. “That tub session is for an extension to the sky train at Sky Harbor International Airport. That sky train is going to fly over the existing Terminal 2, and then Terminal 2 will soon be demolished. A new modern terminal will be built there, along with a hotel. But because it flies over the existing Terminal 2, there’s a 300-foot span, and so the students got to see that being formed up. “We also saw some of the engineering, to understand how there are two sections that are cantilevered, and then there’s a third section that will get dropped in, and it will all get post-tensioned. It was a great learning exercise for the students. Whenever you talk to students about the idea of a 300-foot span, their eyes get pretty big.”