Issue date: 4/9/07 Section: News

The Cal Poly engineering team SLOMobility, made of four seniors, won first place for its design of Los Angeles 100 years into the future. [Click to enlarge]

A Cal Poly civil engineering team won the design competition "City of the Future: A Design and Engineering Challenge" in Los Angeles in March for a structural plan for the city 100 years from now.

The team, SLOMobility, was composed of four civil engineering seniors: Derek Benedict, Tony Henderson, Karen Nishimoto and Chris Pratt.

"It is hard because you are looking 100 years in the future," Benedict said.

The event was sponsored by The History Channel, IBM and The American Society of Civil Engineers, and the parameters for the competition were based around a design submitted from a professional architectural firm.

Three teams competed in the competition, including two from Cal Poly and one from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Each team had the choice to concentrate in one of three areas of design: transportation, water or energy. SLOMobility chose to design a future solution for transportation in Los Angeles.

Using a proposal created by the professional architectural team that showed arch-like structures constructed over existing freeways, creating multiple levels for different purposes, SLOMobility developed a plan for citywide transportation. In their plan, the team considered many guiding questions, including how to transport waste, how the rising water level will affect the city and if bike compatibility was necessary.

"A lot of it was based on innovation, originality and how well we provided engineering solutions," Henderson said.

The competition was brought to Benedict's attention when his adviser, Gregg Siegel, who is active in the American Society of Civil Engineers, was recruiting students to create a Cal Poly team.

Benedict, the former president of Cal Poly's Society of Civil Engineers, worked to find team members and develop a winning design.

"He brought the idea to us and we consulted with several faculty members," Henderson said.

Continued...

Page 1 of 2 next >

Article Tools