Video-Game Nut's Dream

摘要

If video game maker Nintendo ever released a construction-related product, it would probably look a lot like the Pacific Northwest Center for Construction Research and Education, now being built at the University of Washington, Seattle. To be used by the school's College of Architecture and Urban Planning, which includes its construction management program, the 25,000-sq-ft facility will bring virtual reality and the latest building imaging technology to the classroom when it is completed at the end of 2008. The center will emerge from a $2.5-million renovation of a former U.S. Navy facility that was donated to the university. It is the brainchild of John Schaufel-berger, a retired Army Corps of Engineers officer and former West Point instructor who now chairs the university's CM program. Heading up the fund-raising effort is Terry Deeny, a university alumnus, retired Seattle-based utility contractor and former national president of the Associated General Contractors. "We needed a research facility because we had lost several good professors for lack of research space," he says.