Study Trip Chicago day 2

Due to the jet lag, the day starts pretty early for most of us. Meghana sat for almost 2 hours in the hallway waiting for somebody to join her ‘Jet Lag Committee members’, with not much success unfortunately. Her Snapchat stories are pretty funny, though. Around 6 everyone is already awake, wandering around the hostel, trying to find a free toilet or a free shower, mission impossible apparently. Some people succeeded, telling the stories of their fulfilled mission to the next generations.

After breakfast, that consists of bagels, sugar-cereals, milk and a lot of coffee, we are ready to go.

Our first visit is at the IIT (Illinois Institute of Technology) and the first appointment of the day is with Brent Stephens, professor of Architectural Engineering, who presented the university, his work and the PhDs he’s working with, who also presented their projects.

The presentations were very informative, Haoran Zhao talked us about outdoor pollutant transport into buildings, Torkan Fazli was speaking about energy models, Dan Zhao his presentation was about microbiological growth on building materials and Akram Ali showed us the way for an open source environmental sensors.

The next presentation was  about a kind of VIRTUe but for Chicago, called Illinois Tech DOE. This project will be situated north of the campus, next to the train rails. The project was technologically very ambitious.

The day continues with a small tour in the architectural engineering department, where they showed us the supersonic wind tunnel where Flash was trained.

After lunch we are invited to visit the Wanger center. Here they showed us the way the electricity was distributed through the many buildings on the campus. They also have a wind mill, however this was more for show and educational purposes than for actual electricity delivering.

Afterwards, we got the chance to have an insight of the history of the University, especially regarding the architect who most influenced its design, Mies van der Rohe, and made a tour of the campus through the buildings he designed. The tour was long and very fulfilling in our needs for information about architecture. We then decided to go downtown for a drink and had a walk through the main avenues of the city.

Some people went back to the hostel, enjoyed some pool (with an overwhelming victory of the Italian team) and went for dinner in a nice place not far from there. The chicken wings were so spicy that our super strong guys could barely handle it.

The rest of the group stayed in the city center enjoying some beers at a bar with a special ambiance.

It’s just 11pm but most of us still feel the jet lag. Time to go to bed and sleep and rise up and shine when the alarm will sound at 7:30 the next day!

– Written by Bram & Daria –