Annual Report Year 2009 - Civil and Environmental Engineering

PROGRAM AREAS
VECELLIO CONSTRUCTION ENGINEERING AND MANAGEMENT
Torgersen presents Vecellio Distinguished Lecture
The 2009 Vecellio Distinguished
Lecture was presented by Paul E.
Torgersen, president emeritus of Virginia
Tech and a member of the National
Academy of Engineering.
His talk was titled: “The Virginia
Tech Personal Computer Initiative or
Walking 20 Miles in the Snow to Catch
the School Bus.”
A synopsis of his talk is as follows:
Twenty-five years ago the College
of Engineering required of its entering
freshmen the purchase of a personal
computer. Virginia Tech was the first
public university in the nation to do so.
The machine was described as “portable”
but weighed over 40 pounds.
It had all of 256K of memory and a
9” amber monochrome monitor. By
standards even a few years later, the
required machine was primitive.
The decision to impose this requirement
upon an entering freshman
class, the selection of a vendor and a
machine, and the actual distribution of
hardware and software were not without
some interesting moments and just
a little controversy.
One faculty member critical of the
initial recommendation concluded,
“Whatever you guys are on, you
TORGERSEN
should make it available to everyone. It’ll
solve all the world’s problems.”
Would this computer requirement and
added cost impact enrollments Would
it produce a more marketable graduate
We knew the answer to the second
question but not the first.
The time lapse from the initial recommendation
to the distribution of
computers to students was 15 months.
We were on a fast track. This was
truly a team effort of some dedicated
faculty.
Two comments from the graduating
class might set this in perspective:
“The class of ’87 was quite jealous …
they had to endure FORTRAN programming
with card decks. We (the
class of ’88) actually programmed our
own PC’s, did drafting on our PC’s,
and wrote papers on our PC’s. And a
second comment …. “I still have my
computer and show it to my kids so
they know what the first ‘laptop’ looked
like (my version of walking 20 miles in
the snow to catch the school bus).”
In hindsight, now 25 years later one
of the principal players concluded,
“How little we understood at that time
how computing would evolve, how
pervasive it would become in our daily
lives as well as our engineering work.
In that sense we were lucky rather
than enlightened.”
Owens delivers CH2M Hill Distinguished Lecture
The CH2M Hill Distinguished Lecture was presented by
Brendan Owens, vice president for the U.S. Green Building
Council. His talk was titled: “Mind the Gap: Integrated design,
construction, operations and maintenance of green buildings.”
A synopsis of Owens’ lecture is as follows: the design,
construction, operation and maintenance of high performance
green buildings is, by many metrics, the fastest growing sector
of the buildings industry and major initiatives are under way to
make green buildings the industry standard of care.
“Green” has become ubiquitous in everyday U.S. life.
Despite its almost universal application to everything from
cars to clothes, it has become clear that “green”, while
understood in a general sense, often describes widely
varying performance features depending on the perspective
of the entity applying the label. Understanding the underlying
technical details of a “green” claim is critical to preventing
misalignment of performance goals and greenwashing.
Mind the Gap was a discussion about integrated design,
construction, operations, maintenance and verification of high
performance green buildings, green building rating systems
such as USGBC’s LEED and the role that buildings play as
part of the power, water and communications infrastructure
modern society relies on. Gaps exist in making all of these
systems function as efficiently and effectively as possible.
22 | VIA REPORT | 2009