Professors Doug Noble and Karen Kensek report that the PCI Foundation studio for the USC Carapace Pavilion is now in the final stages and the Carapace will be installed Monday, June 6, 2022. The Carapace is complete and loaded onto the truck for transportation to the site. The Carapace is fabricated from Ultra-High Performance Concrete (UHPC) that has been tested to 25,000psi. More than 300 students, alumni, faculty and friends have taken part in this hands-on project that was design and fabricated by the USC School of Architecture with help and guidance from Clark Pacific in Fontana, California. The project faced many delays, including a government shutdown and a global pandemic. The students and faculty also create extra hurdles for themselves as they attempted to push the architecture engineering envelope. The project uses an anti-clastic geometry in a tubular overall geometry. Custom software tools were created to support the design phase. The five panels of the project were cast in a single mold.
The Carapace Pavilion will get an escort to the site from the Porsche Cayenne Offroad Car Club, led by USC alumnus Simon Chiu.
As soon as the Carapace is installed, USC will begin work on the next project: designing and fabricating small houses for seasonal park rangers at Joshua Tree National park.