The Geology P.A.G.E.: Geology in Pop Culture

Sunday, November 27, 2016

Geology in Pop Culture - U of U Parking Garage

Back in 2012 (or about) the University of Utah decided that they wanted to build a parking structure next to the Sutton Geology Building. This was a rather contentious issue since we had a phenomenal view of the Salt Lake valley from our building and putting a parking structure right next to our building would not only block our view but would be a rather ugly eyesore to the campus in general. After much debate there were people from the department appointed to the committee to design the parking garage including myself as the Sutton Geology Building student representative and Marjorie Chan as the faculty representative.

Even though one of the main concerns of the Geology Department was blocking the view, we also didn't want the parking garage to be, well, a parking garage. We wanted something that wouldn't be an eyesore to look at day in and day out for the students and faculty, long after most of them (including myself) have moved on. To do this I sent in my own ideas for what we would want for the building and the walkways that lay between the parking garage and the Geology Building.

We eventually were able to work with the architects and the committee to get the parking garage to a height that would not impede the views from the 3rd or 4th floor of the Sutton Geology Building at all, which is more than any of us could ask for. However, their initial ideas for the walkway seemed pretty far from what we (Marjorie and I) thought were good ideas so we started kicking around ideas of our own. I thought a great idea would be to draw people in from the street via a braided river design that flowed into a meandering river.

I used the above image (from UMCES.edu) as a baseline for what I wanted the walkway to look like.

I then drew this up, based on the construction drawings for where the Parking Garage (grey box on the left) and the Sutton Geology Building (grey box on the right) were located. I then traced in a walkway connecting the main walkways that were likely to not change in the area, adding in some small islands to emphasize the braided river scheme.

Lo and behold, after I submitted the above design to the architects and landscape person, they come back with the above image. Besides cutting the meandering portion of the river short, the design was identical to what I had worked up myself! Everyone on the committee loved it as well.

Besides just the walkway, there was a matter of the facade of the building. What did we want to do? By this point Marjorie Chan was no longer able to be on the committee due to time constraints so the department chair, John Bartley, joined on in her stead. We talked it over and we agreed that looking out over the Salt Lake Valley, it would be nice to have a graphic illustrating the Basin and Range illustrating what you are looking at towards the west.

Based on that conversation, I came up with the above design. It was tweaked a little between John and I, but generally it remained the same. I designed a silhouette of the Basin and Range provenance from the Geology Building west to the Nevada state line.

When looking from East to West (right to left on the picture above), the mountain ranges you can see are the Wasatch Mountains (which the Sutton Geology Building was located on), then the Oquirrh Mts, the Stansbury Mts, the Cedar Mts, the Bonneville Salt Flats, and finally the Deep Creek Mts, all the way at the border with Nevada. I tried to design the mountains and the valleys to emphasize the way that the Basin and Range formed, with the tilting of these massive blocks and the filling of sediment in between. I also wanted to highlight that the Bonneville Salt Flats are actually located above some buried mountain ranges that formed the same way. My biggest mistake was when designing the mountains, which was fixed by this image, the main Deep Creek fault actually tilted in the opposite direction, towards the west, from all the other mountains to the east of it.

This design the committee also agreed upon our proposal for the facade, and construction went ahead on the garage.

October 3rd, 2014

By this point, since I was no longer a student and on campus everyday, I had my advisor, Tony Ekdale, take some in construction images for me while they were building it. All of these images are from the Sutton Geology Building (3rd floor), looking towards the west.

October 6th, 2014