Mapping the Brooks Center

Have you every walked through the Brooks Center and gotten lost? You aren’t alone. The Brooks Forest Products Center, which houses many of the Sustainable Biomaterials faculty and labs for the Packaging Systems and Design and Sustainable Biomaterials majors is actually a set of three buildings conjoined together. “It can be hard to know where you are. Students and faculty from on-campus will ask me ‘what is your office number?’ I tell them ‘Well, it's complicated’” says Dr. Daniel Hindman. As part of an undergraduate research project led by Hindman, Austin Greifenkamp has been using his skills in REVIT, a computer design program for building construction. Austin has been transferring the paper building floor plans of the area surrounding the Wood Engineering Laboratory, technically known as Building 238, including the curved row of offices which surround the lab to create a virtual building model. “There were some challenging parts to interpreting the plans such as finding the measurement references, and tracking the elevations with the exterior of the building.” Austin took Dr. Hindman’s SBIO 2314 Building Information Modeling for Wood-Based Construction in Spring 2021. Eager to learn more, Austin enrolled in an independent study (SBIO 4994) with Dr. Hindman to learn more. Future plans are to create models of the Pallet Lab and Innovation Spaces (Buildings 236 and 237) in the future to help students learn how REVIT can be used in practice – and keep future students from being lost at Brooks.