Gaining hands-on experience, Virginia Tech architecture students visit the South Boston facility where the locally sourced poplar panels they’ve designed are manufactured. A collaboration of the City of Radford, the school, and the museum, the train-viewing platform just below Glencoe will also demonstrate the use of a new sustainable and locally sourced building material. Its local manufacture contributes to regional economic development.
Last January, trooping down the wintry riverbank below the Glencoe Museum, folks from the Radford Heritage Foundation, Glencoe, and the city of Radford, joined Virginia Tech architecture students, and building materials faculty gathering just above the railroad tracks to talk about building a train-viewing platform.
Standing in the brambles and gravel along the right-of-way that afternoon, the groups talked about a cantilevered platform with a view of the historic bridge over the New.
The project envisioned multiple benefits to the collaboration. In addition to developing the train tourism of Radford, designing the structure and educational signage would foster practical experience among the VT architecture students. Reaching beyond the site, the platform itself would demonstrate the use of a new sustainable and locally sourced building material and local manufacturing would contribute to regional economic development.
In an update from VT architecture associate professor and Radford resident, Kay Edge, events, a little late out of the station, are now moving forward and scheduled to begin in August.
“As you might imagine with a student project, it’s behind schedule, but I think we’re finally making progress!” she wrote in an email.
“We are using a foundation system called helical pile and those have been donated. Basically, they’re giant screws that get placed at strategic points in the earth to hold up the structure,” she said.
Edge and students visited the South Boston manufacturing facility that is pressing the panels that are made of locally sourced poplar, a fast-growing tree species.
A structural engineer certified the platform’s safety and advised the design team on strategies to deal with some unique challenges they’ve faced on the steeply sloped and poison ivy-thick site.
“In order to make the viewing shelter accessible for everyone, we are bringing a bridge out from Unruh Drive over the slope,” Edge said. “Once you get out to a point where the train can be seen, you’re about 18 feet off the ground. There are multiple steel columns that will hold up the viewing structure there and because they’re so tall, the structural challenge is that they will have a tendency to sway. Even if the swaying is small enough that it doesn’t present a danger, it still freaks people out to feel it. So the engineer is helping us make the structure rigid so that doesn’t happen.“
The design also needs to avoid a gas line and an access road that the city needs in order to get to a nearby tar tank.
Edge is arranging to have an Atmos Energy employee present for the drilling of the columns.
“The challenge I had as a teacher was to push students to design something that is unique and memorable, but also buildable,” the architect said. “I felt they were a little timid in their proposals at the beginning of the semester so we spent extra time on design. That is another reason we are delayed. But, it’s never a mistake to spend extra time on design.”
