Ever since the Chargers team announced that it wanted to move into a new stadium \u2014 whether in Los Angeles or, preferably, in Downtown San Diego \u2014people have been imagining what to do with the Qualcomm Stadium site.<\/p>\n
There have been plenty of ideas for the centrally located property in Mission Valley: Build a more modern Chargers stadium at the site; open up the area to commercial and residential development; make a large central park; and, most recently, expand San Diego State University there to include new classrooms, housing and a smaller stadium for the Aztecs.<\/p>\n The idea for a west campus was endorsed by SDSU president Elliot Hirsham and incorporated as a selling point for Measure D, the so-called Citizen\u2019s Plan for a new Chargers stadium.<\/p>\n Although voters rejected Measure D in November, many people still believe that a west campus for the college is the best use for the property \u2014 including two groups of engineering students who recently completed capstone projects that envisioned the new campus.<\/p>\n \u201cI think it\u2019s a great idea, actually. Right now a lot of that land is wasted just on the parking lot so if they would add a parking structure, a lot of that land becomes more useful,\u201d SDSU engineering student Rudy Urzua said. \u201cAnd it would look a lot nicer. It would be a big improvement.\u201d<\/p>\n Urzua was the project leader for San Diego Urban Engineering, the team name for his group that worked on the west campus plan for the Engineering Capstone Design Class.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s one of the final classes for civil, construction and environmental engineering students at San Diego State,\u201d said adjunct professor John Prince, who oversees the student projects. \u201cThe point of the class literally is capstone design; it is for them as teams to tackle a multidisciplinary project.\u201d<\/p>\n For the west campus project, the teams worked from a concept plan that was presented by representatives from JMI Realty, Cruzan Development, Cisterra Development and architects from Carrier Johnson + Culture, and then applied a multidisciplinary approach to solving several engineering issues.<\/p>\n \u201cWe took what their ideas were and [designed] the infrastructure for the project,\u201d Urzua said. \u201cSo we did the sewer and water distribution and the traffic analysis to make that what they wanted it to be like would work.\u201d<\/p>\n The west campus concept \u2014 as envisioned by the development and architecture companies \u2014 included a 40,000-seat stadium; 3,900 student apartments; 400 faculty housing units; a 200-room hotel; 630,000 square feet of academic and campus space; 200,000 square feet of commercial space; and 40 acres of open space, part of which would be used for the San Diego River Park project.<\/p>\n There would also be parking lots and two parking structures, although it was discovered that automobile traffic would decrease in the new plan due to the much smaller stadium.<\/p>\n \u201cWe found in the traffic analysis that the traffic impact wasn\u2019t really an impact at all,\u201d Urzua said. \u201cRight now the stadium seats 70,000 and the new stadium would only seat 40,000 and then you add on another 10,000 to 15,000 students and faculty daily, so the traffic would increase throughout the week a little, but on a total basis it wouldn\u2019t increase. So there wouldn\u2019t need to be any reason to widen any roads, any lanes or anything like that.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The same could not be said of the water systems in the west campus plan.<\/p>\n \u201cFor that layout, we weren\u2019t able to keep any of the existing storm drainage. The existing storm drains would have been under the proposed buildings so those had to be moved,\u201d said student Kelly Flint, who was the project leader for the team Flint and Sons. \u201cIn our project, all of the existing piping for storm drainage would have been excavated and new ones put in.\u201d<\/p>\n Although she found the project \u201cinteresting because it had to do with SDSU,\u201d Flint said if this design were to be proposed for real, it would have more issues than just moving all the sewer drainage and water pipes.<\/p>\n \u201cThe layout that we were working with, if they were going to go off that, they probably wouldn\u2019t want to go off that one,\u201d she said. \u201cOn the site that\u2019s closest to the river there was faculty housing and, according to building codes in San Diego, housing has to be at least two feet above the flood elevation. And in the case of Qualcomm, the flood elevation, I think, is 62 feet or something. The 100-year flood line goes all the way up to the back of the site so it would be better to have office buildings or something other than housing at that part of the site.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s insights from a hands-on project like this that Prince said makes the capstone class invaluable for students.<\/p>\n \u201cThis was a cool, local, high-profile, multidisciplinary development to have some students tackle and do some of the more technical engineering analysis behind a development of that nature,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Although the west campus project was speculative and the work the students did won\u2019t ever be used past getting a grade, there are a growing percentage of student projects in the capstone class that are commissioned by public agencies that want to give student engineers real-world experience.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat we have a hard time getting for the class are developers, private projects and developers that might want a student group to reach out,\u201d Prince said.<\/p>\n For developers who have a project in mind for students to work on in the capstone class, or to have any questions answered about the program, contact Prince at 619-787-5566 or jprince@delanegroup.com<\/a><\/em>; or contact his co-instructor Jim Haughey at 858-614-5038 or jrhaugey@mbakerintl.com<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n \u2014Comun\u00edquese con Jeff Clemetson en jeff@sdcnn.com.<\/em><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Por Jeff Clemetson | Editor<\/p>","protected":false},"author":778,"featured_media":233887,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"11557","_seopress_titles_title":"Working on a new plan","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[11547,11557,11551,11550],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-233886","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features","category-mission-valley-news","category-news","category-top-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233886","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/778"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=233886"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233886\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/233887"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=233886"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=233886"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=233886"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Working](\"https:\/\/missionvalleynews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/01\/web-design-day1.jpg\")
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