For some reason they still have a construction webcam running on the building, even though the construction is all indoors. Notice that the dome covering the camera is pretty grimy now.
The Thomas and Anne Day quad. If you look up Thomas Day in the Los Angeles Times archives, back in 1992 there was a brutal fight between SDSU President Day and the professorate over proposed budget cuts, leading to a vote of no confidence by them, and Day stepped down in 1996. He had been SDSU president since 1978, nearly twenty years. As far as we can tell, Thomas Day is still alive, but his wife Anne passed away in 2013, making her one of the few deceased people on the building.
The plain soil bit behind the red walkway; if you were facing towards Day quad, this view would be 90 degrees to the right. The building with the arched walkway dates to the 1940s. The table on the extreme right behind the tree is one of the permanent ping-pong tables that sit in the sun.
One of the engineering lab rooms inside the ground floor of the building. All interior photographs were taken quickly.
Elevator to the second floor; this was the one in the front area of the South building.
And this is where the construction starts. The actual engineering labs (which function as lab and classroom) were finished, but all the stuff across from them was unfinished.
One of the unfinished areas; possibly a study area or a space for a computer lab.
Third floor of the South wing; the paper on the floor is there to protect it from heavy dolly wear and whatnot. The white "wall" where the exit sign is in the back is actual more of that white plastic sheeting.
As you can see it's all over the place. I think this might be the second floor.
Clark is the construction firm involved, and that's what the third-story floorplan looks like.
And here is a zone under construction, with one of the workers doing something. Notice that the glass is being held in true by painter's blue paper tape at the corner.
More of what ex-President Hirshman was good at, "selling" naming rights for the EIS. Here is their third-story student and faculty lounge, named after the Meyers.
And here's the Fronius Room on the second floor.
Yes the man himself got something named after him, the second story terrace where students' brains will melt in the sun.
Hirshman's tables and deck furniture (in the back).
Hirshman's benches.
I guess all of this is payment for the names on the building. Hirshman himself is now president of Stevenson University, a private college near Baltimore, Maryland that used to be Villa Julie College, a Catholic women's junior college from the late 1940s to the 1960s that went co-educational in 1972.
They named a terrace on the second story of the North wing, just because they could.
There is a bridge that connects the North wing to the old Engineering building and they gave naming rights to the Doyle family foundation. I didn't get photos of every plaque, but some of them were for local companies, and seeing all these names in metal made it look more like a Good 'Ol Boys club then anything truly academic.
All the stairwells are THX-1138 White and the paint fumes are overpowering.
.....Except for the landings with standpipes. New commercial/institutional fire code thing?
They are using more-and-more LCD TV screens as permanent monitors - here is one that has been displaying the same message since the summer began.
SDSU things that aren't the EIS
As long as we are showing photos of of SDSU, let me show you what they do to the place during the summer.
A large hole behind the EIS, don't ask me why, but you see stuff like that.
Bench made by the Works Progress Administration possibly in 1938 or 1940. Portions of the original college were built by the WPA right before America's involvement in World War II, such as....
This long portico attached to Hepner Hall. Which as I was walking around.....
One of the Hepner classrooms was being gutted and modernized, something that has been happening to the creakier classrooms in the older buildings for the last couple of years. This creeping change will probably take a decade to finish.
They allowed the art students to do university-sanctioned "street art" (so it was mamby-pamby) a few years ago, and now the art is beginning to rot off the boards.
Behind a temporary fence they were replanting this mangy corner garden, possibly to be a Xeriscape. This is near the Life Science building that used to be the SDSU model grade school in the 1940s that was conjoined to the Physics-Astronomy building in the 1950s or early 1960s.
The corner next to that fenced garden. that two way portico leads to the other Life Science building across a bridge. Yes, that is a TV yagi antenna. If you squint at SDSU, you think you are on the Spanish coast.
Worst photograph of Hardy Tower ever, taken from the plants alongside that long portico. Speaking of that space.....
This lamp has been sitting like this for a while now, notice the cobwebs inside.
More of that green fencing. Re-laying paving bricks in front to the SDSU bookstore, probably because it was sinking in at spots.
This has been a thing for two years; the elevator foyer in the Student Services building had been there for twenty years; Hirshman had them enclose it with glass doors and walls and gave the Mack family donors the naming rights.
They really want you to know that this was "gifted" by this Mack family.
This is inside an elevator.
Don't ask me why these cherry picker rigs are in this faded courtyard. The grass was always dying and now it's been churned up.
The same space a few days later.
.....I think I've made my point, which is "the university is always being worked on in the summer."
Bonus: Those @%&*ing Ofo bikes
The urban cancer of mainland China, brightly-colored rent-a-bikes that use a smartphone app to ride, have hit San Diego, and the bikes littered the campus this month.
Ofo has been around since 2014 and they started sending their canary yellow bikes to San Francisco somewhere in the last year or so, and San Diego is now the "sideshow of a sideshow" to quote Donald Wolfit's version of General Sir Archibald James Murray in Lawrence of Arabia, of the Great Undeclared Non-Motorized Metered Transport War. Ofo is one of five or six "bike or scooter sharing" businesses operating in the town. Here the bikes are sitting in the second-floor walkway of Parking Structure Two, which has been around since the late 1960s.
Bike left in front of the Life Sciences building, a hazard for the twentysomething who walks while looking at their smartphone.
This Ofo bike lacks the "skinned" basket frame and the bent fender of a true veteran.
The big plastic yellow dingus on the back forks is the locking mechanism to keep free rides and theft from happening. You pay a dollar an hour to ride this dorky thing. There is a big chance that Ofo might vanish from San Diego as they have from other burgs in other states.
The only guy happy that a mainland Chinese "unicorn" start-up is hitting a wall in America, this blog's Sebastian Gorka, Chris Chappell. 很多运气，最白的家伙！
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