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Team 17

Team Members

Faculty Advisor

Joshua Okoli
Brian Cruz
Ryan Johns
Timothy Ayers

Edward Weingart

Sponsor

Krenicki Arts and Engineering Institute

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Systematic Assessment and Visualization of the Structural Rigging System in UConn’s Jorgensen Theater

The Jorgensen Center for the Performing Arts, opened in December 1955, is a historical theater that serves a wide range of events for the University of Connecticut. The center was named for UConn president Albert N. Jorgensen, who oversaw construction. Within this center are two performance spaces: The Albert N. Jorgensen Theater located in the upper level of the building, and the main focus of this project that is the Harriet S. Jorgensen Theater located on the basement level. This space is a proscenium-style theater that houses four-hundred and eighty-five patrons, as well as a double-purchase counterweight rigging system and fully trapped stage. The Harriet S. Jorgensen Theater was not planned in the original construction of the center, but was rather added in after the construction on the Albert N. Jorgensen Theater concluded. Considering its last-minute construction, available data on the plans, structure, and layout are not readily available and have been lost since the transition from hard copy plans to digital ones. This loss of documentation has left the theater with no engineering-specific data, which includes the identification of the steel beams and other steel members, measurements, and capacity. The goal of this project is to understand the structural capacity of the rigging system, and how that interacts and impacts the steel structure, to address ever-creative evolving, and challenging future demands of the theater. This includes supporting flying actors, automation equipment, static and dynamic suspended scenery. The scope of this project includes identifying the steel members within the fly space, develop the structural plan and model , and compute the structural, load carrying capacity of the system overall.