Building upon the form of a middle school, this thesis is an examination of several architectural questions. This new middle school is imagined to exist at the old Blacksburg Middle school site on Main street between Clay and Eheart streets. Fundamental to the thesis is the concept of centrality. Correspondingly, a large central gathering space forms the heart of the school. Flow emanates from this heart into arterial hallways that open up to the classrooms and finally to capillary hallway window nooks and occupiable classroom windows. These nested spacial and circulatory scales form another focus of the thesis. Additionally, a series of classrooms types are explored giving consideration to furnishing and lighting. / Master of Architecture

M.S.

This thesis has four objectives: First, to investigate the need for a new elementary school in Blacksburg, Virginia. Second, to show how present trends in education have affected the design of elementary schools in Virginia and in the United States. Third, to analyze the requirements of the various school departments and areas. Fourth, to prepare detailed drawings of a school incorporating the required elements as revealed by the investigation. The school is to be designated as the "Blacksburg Elementary School.” / Master of Science

Master of Science

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the ideal possibilities in planning an ideal medium-sized hospital, and to incorporate these possibilities into the design of a general hospital for Blacksburg and the surrounding communities. Before any planning can be done, the requirements of the hospital must be agreed upon. By making a thorough research, one is able to determine the hospital needs of a community; the problems relating to planning, maintenance and operation of the hospital; the number of beds required; and the types of services to be offered. All these requirements will be affected by the extent of other existing facilities in the community and by those facilities in surrounding communities. When the number of beds that will be required, and the services to be offered have been decided upon, a program is developed. This program will show with reasonable completeness the requirements of each department of the hospital as to its approximate area, its major equipment, and the number and classification of personnel employed in the department. When the program is complete, and the site for the hospital has been selected, we can proceed with the planning of the building and the preparation of drawings for it. The following program gives a complete compilation of the hospital’s requirements, and enough information so that they may be readily translated into the actual size, shape, and arrangement of the eventual building, and the building’s relationship to the site. / Master of Science

In 1939, a fifth steam generating unit was added to the Virginia Polytechnic Institute Central Heating and Power Plant. This unit was an E. Keeler, 500 horsepower, three drum, bent water tube type boiler, fired by a Westinghouse five retort underfeed stoker with link-grate section. Soon after the installation of this unit, W.F. Diamond and C.F. DeBush made an investigation to determine the effects of various fuel bed depths on the efficiency of the unity. Approximately 6 1/2 years have elapsed since their investigation was completed. No other tests have been conducted on the unit up to now. Consequently, its performance characteristics and maximum thermal efficiency at the present time are not accurately known. Even though Diamond and DeBusk made their investigation to determine the effect of various depths of fuel bed on the performance of the unit, the optimum percentage C0₂, and the range of load for maximum thermal efficiency, there is at the present time, a decided difference of opinion among the power plant personnel regarding these facts. It is contemplated that a sixth unit will shortly be installed in the V.P.I. Power Plant. Therefore, it is necessary to know what maximum continuous load and what peak loads for short periods of time the No. five until can be expected to carry now that it has been in operation for almost seven years. During the past two or three years, the operation of the stoker on the No. five unit has not been satisfactory. Large coke trees (see Discussion of Results, page 67) are formed in the fuel bed at the front end of the stoker where coal enters the furnace. There coke trees ride on the fuel bed as it moves from the front end of the furnace to the ash discharge orifice (see Fig 18), and are only partially consumed during combustion. When they reach the ash discharge orifice clogging results. This necessitates cleaning the orifice and ash discharge plates with a firing iron. Actual cases have been known to occur when a complete loss of load and a 50 per cent reduction in steam pressure have resulted from the clogging of the orifice. / Master of Science

In a large part of the soil fertility studies that have been attempted in the past, a great number of the results obtained were based almost entirely on crop yields. These yields were used as the final criterion upon which to draw conclusions as to whether a given system of soil management was a profitable one. At the Virginia Agricultural Experiment Station, Blacksburg, Virginia, a series of rotation and continuous cropping experiments have been undergoing a specified treatment for a period of 24 years. Conclusions as to the expediency of the practices followed have been approached from a purely crop yield basis. This method is serving its purpose in showing exactly how much the land is producing at the present time under a given soil management practice. It is believed, however, that a soil management program goes further than this. A practice based on crop production alone may prove, over a long period of time, to be a poor one. Perhaps just as important are the conditions arising within the soil relating to these practices. Whether or not the system evolved is one of soil building rather than one of soil depletion, is a question which necessarily must be considered before any recommendation as to the soil management practices to be followed, may be attempted. / Master of Science

This thesis is an investigation of architectural elements and lighting conditions that reinforce a journey. From the initial encounter to the presence of the sanctuary, a Presbyterian church has been constructed in downtown Blacksburg to instrumentally govern an interaction between congregation and form. / Master of Architecture

Virtual City Environments (VCEs) and Mirror Worlds can be a useful resource for communities such as the local government, researchers and the general public to collaborate on tasks like town planning, threat assessment, commerce and research. There are open standards like Extensible 3D (X3D, which represents 3D graphics) and CityGML (a Geography Markup Language to manage 3D building data). These standards are royalty-free and used to create, manage, share and portray such environments. However, there are critical challenges to delivering such complex and detailed Mirror Worlds in real-time. In this work, we focus on runtime data structures and performance for Level-of-Detail (LOD) management and real-time portrayal. We begin with a VCE defined in existing semantic models such as the CityGML specification. We implement and evaluate a novel X3D-based Level-of-Detail technique called ProxyPrismLOD, which leverages the CityGML standard of a 4-step LOD hierarchy. For switching between different models of the same object at near ranges, our LOD technique uses a custom shape we call a ProxyPrism to optimally encapsulate irregularly and asymmetrically shaped building models. First, we ran a user study to understand the visual dynamics of range-based LOD switching. Specifically, we evaluated several scaling factors for an exponential range cutoff function. The function is based on the model's size as well as the environment density. In this experiment, participants rated "visual granularity" and "distraction" levels of the LOD technique over two Software Field-of-View (sFOV) conditions. A scaling factor of Beta = 3 was determined. Second, we ran a series of simulations to study the performance benefits of ProxyPrismLOD technique over the basic range-based LOD. We observed performance benefits up to 7.46% in terms of overall Frames-per-Seconds (FPS) on the models we tested. / Master of Science

The principle objectives of the study were; (1) determine accurately the time of breeding, (2) lactation, (3) breeding age, (4) number per litter, and to obtain other miscellaneous data on this popular game animal. Three study areas of varying habitat were chosen. The President’s Hill (17.5 acres) is located on the V. P. I. college campus; Turkey Pen Woods (3.7 acres) is about one-half mile from the President’s Hill and adjacent to a paved highway, and North Crumpacker Woods (6.7 acres) is about 200 yards from Turkey Pen Woods. A special trap was designed, and 74 were constructed for use throughout the study. The Monel, size I, fish tag was used for tagging the ear of the squirrel. The original handling techniques were patterned from those used by previous investigators, however, shortly after the project was begun a squirrel funnel, made of tightly woven sack and one-fourth inch hardware cloth, was constructed and successfully used throughout the remainder of the study. / M.S.