The One With Arches and Trusses

            Today we took a pretty cool tour of some of the major sporting facilities on campus. While that fact alone is enough to entertain me throughout the entire tour, the topic of discussion kept my interest just as much. At each facility, we looked at the different ways of supporting raised roofs while using a small amount of material

            We started in Huff Hall looking at how the structure of the building was able to hold the building up. Huff was one of the more complex structures we looked at. Starting at the bottom, we saw multiple columns on each side of the court that stood right in the middle of the seats and even caused some seats to be obstructed. From there we found a very complex series of trusses that all worked together to evenly disperse the weight of the ceiling to the girder that runs along the top of the columns. While the system of trusses was very complex, it was actually easy to follow the path of the force of the ceiling as it ran along the trusses into the columns.

            After we were led with false hope through a tunnel connecting Huff and Armory, we finally made it to The Armory. The Armory offered a very different technique as it uses arches to hold up the ceiling. The most interesting part of the armory, other than a flat indoor track, is that the arches are made up of separate halves connected at the very top with a single pin. At the most important part of the structure, you would expect to see a very complex system, but a single pin joins the two parts of the arch and offers the main support for the roof. The roof shines light on this pin also to emphasize the simplicity and importance.

            After a few jaywalking incidents, we finally made it to Irwin. He we saw a little bit of both of the previous structures combined. To begin with, Irwin was designed to offer as large of an indoor practice facility as possible while not being too large of a structure for the space it takes up. The design then included a large supports that ran the full length of the structure as opposed to running crosswise on the structure. These supports offered a slanted roof which allow for practice without the roof getting in the way. From these supports, we see a series of truss like structures running crosswise that help take the load off the main beams and direct it to beams that are built into the concrete walls on the sides. The walls are made around the support beams and protect them from the many stresses they could get as a result of our quarterbacks trying to throw the ball.

            All in all, this trip was very interesting, and it opened my eyes the structure of the many buildings I see around campus, but have never been in.