Signature Engineering Building Project

Creative Director and Co-Principal Investigator
Signature Engineering Building Project, Blacksburg, VA, 2012
Funded by the School of Visual Arts (SOVA) at Virginia Tech
~Awarded tenure in spring, 2016

In this ongoing project, I am working with Dr. Pablo Tarazaga and Mary Kasarda from the Mechanical Engineering Department at Virginia Tech to develop new smart infrastructure technologies and new approaches to building, modeling and design.

My creative director role in the project was scanning the interior of the SEB building during the construction phase. During the scanning process of all five floors, I 3D printed a mount to hold checkerboard markers. These markers were place on each of the 200 accelerometer mounts in the building. After the scanning process, all the scans were tied together into one-point cloud. In the future, I will take this data into Bentley point tools to make measurements and placements of all the accelerometer mounts and to pull locational set points. We are developing and validating algorithms with unprecedented access to longitudinal, high-fidelity data from the continuous monitoring of vibration and thermal data throughout the building. These smart infrastructure algorithms will be rigorously benchmarked through carefully calibrated experiments. The proposed work includes investigations of sensor reduction and placement. Access to highly sampled data over long time periods provides a rich knowledge of building motion for refining dynamic models and monitoring structural health. This will enable the advancement of building design practices with transformative potential to facilitate more sustainable building design.

Collaborators: Dr. Pablo A. Tarazaga (Mechanical Engineering and Director of the Virginia Tech Smart Infrastructure Laboratory) and Mary Kasarda (Mechanical Engineering and Co-Director of VT-SIL with expertise in system dynamics and health-monitoring of machinery, and engineering education).