Residing in front of Owens Hall on the Oregon Institute of Technology (OIT) campus is a kinetic sculpture. This sculpture is an outdoor classroom and teaching tool for the Civil Engineering students. I located two PDF documents that describe this sculpture in more detail
here and
here. The
Empty Nest publication reads:
Jesse A. Crabtree Civil Engineering Learning Plaza Construction
The construction south of Owens Hall is being performed by Bogatay Construction directed by a team of faculty and staff in the Civil Engineering and Facilities Departments. The construction will result in a plaza to be named the Jesse A. Crabtree Civil Engineering Learning Plaza in honor of Jesse Crabtree, a founding faculty member in civil engineering. The plaza construction as funded by family and friends of Jesse Crabtree. It will recognize his legacy at Oregon Tech of being a practice-minded teacher by creating an outdoor teaching and social space that incorporates elements specific o teaching in civil engineering: a water feature with various types of water courses and flow regimes, a gridded area on the ground for doing scale drawings in chalk, pervious asphalt and concrete surfaces, standard concrete to steel connections, and the existing Basin steel connections teaching sculpture that incorporates over 20 example steel connections. The Basin was installed two years ago using Percent for Art funds from the Owens Hall remodel. While it serves a teaching purpose, it also provides a perspective on the Klamath Basin as a bioregion that is supported and maintained (and sometimes ought over) by various interests (the columns could represent tribes, farmers and ranchers, and environmentalists) in a state of continual tension and dynamic equilibrium. Additional interpretation of the sculpture is available on a poster in the Owens east hallway.
There is a poster that hangs inside Owens Hall and can be read through a window and gives a good highlight of this sculpture and outdoor classroom and reads:
TECHNICAL ASPECTS
The plaza also serves as an outdoor classroom and learning environment, complete with numerous built-in teaching tools specific to civil engineering.
Hydraulic Features:
The channels flowing around the plaza represent a diversity of hydraulic conditions. The first channel section demonstrates flow past sudden and gradual contractions and expansion. The second channel section is a wider swath, somewhat akin to a riverine floodplain, with riffles and pools along the channel centerline; this wider section may also allow ad hoc channel modeling with gravels or Plasticine. Flow then traverses an inverted siphon, maintaining sufficient pressure to be delivered to the third channel section that demonstrates steady flow through different channel cross-sections (semi-circular, trapezoidal and rectangular). The fourth and final channel section demonstrates flow across different surface roughness elements, affecting the depth and turbulence of the fluid, before discharging in a cascade to the system reservoir and beginning the flow cycle again.
Structural Features
The sculpture and plaza will be used to teach structural steel connections, a topic that many students struggle with, particularly in the two-dimensional environment of plans and chalkboards. The sculpture incorporates 24 different types of steel connections that students can look at, touch, and in some cases, even disassemble and reassemble. The sculpture is an invaluable tool for improving the instruction of steel design for civil engineering students at Oregon Tech. It can also be used as a basis for analysis and design problems in courses other than steel design including statics, solid mechanics, structural analysis, and concrete foundation design.
Transportation and Geotechnical Features:
The plaza contains two rest beds that provide and outdoor laboratory for student-led applied research on innovative pavement and soil projects. Students will design, construct and rest pavements such as permeable concrete, porous asphalt, permeable stone pavers and "driveable" grass. Soil improvement projects, such as researching the results of adding soil cement or lime additives, may also be accommodated. In-situ testing will be conducted on the soils beneath these rest beds using instrumented test well to determine in-situ sub-soil infiltration rates and water quality.
ARTISTIC ASPECTS
The plaza and the sculpture together as a place-based, artistic metaphor for the Klamath Basin. The plaza and the basin suspended from the sculpture are both roughly the same shape as--and thus representations of--the Klamath Basin.
This suspended form covered is a patchwork of aluminum plates representing the rural community's patchwork of farms and land and the heavily engineered nature of the Klamath River watershed, a vision that is also expressed in the heavily engineered channels atop the plaza walls.
The basin has a fracture in it, a fracture that is echoed in one of the plaza walls, symbolic of the sometimes combative and opposing nature of the people and politics of the Klamath Basin, as well as the volcanic history of the area that formed the shape of the surrounding earth.
As with the Klamath Basin that it represents, the suspended basin serves to collect and distribute water downward--or downstream--as do the plaza channels. Water, and who owns the rights to it, has been a contentious issue in the Klamath Basin, occasionally even drawing national media attention. Historically, conflicts over water have taken place between native tribes, farmers and ranchers, and environmentalists who wish to protect the wildlife that depend upon the water. These three powerful influences are represented by the three structural steel columns that hold the basin and its water aloft and in tension. Each of these columns is tugging the water in its direction, and yet each column is necessary to keep the water from being lost altogether. In engineering terms, the water is in equilibrium; the columns--or powerfully interested parties--both support the basin and depend upon it for stability.
Numerous other representation of the rugged west such as wagon wheel and logging derricks can be found in the sculpture, revealing the region's past while looking toward the future.