OCTC CADD Students Design Senior Center

Tom Vittitow, Director of the Elizabeth Munday Senior Citizen Center in Owensboro, with the Munday Center's board of directors have embarked on a long range plan to raise both awareness and funding for the need for a new senior center that would double the size of their current facility. With no funding for the project, Vittitow and the board approached the Computer Aided Drafting and Design Architectural Program Coordinator, Steve Bailes at Owensboro Community and Technical College for assistance in creating the preliminary drawings and renderings to begin to promote the project.

These drawings were prepared by the OCTC students as a practical experience project and enhanced their classroom experience by allowing them to learn to use the state-of-the-art architectural software, Autodesks REVIT 2010, is a real world application. The REVIT software is a building information modeling system that requires design information to be decided and entered before creating the walls and floors and other systems a building contains. Bailes assigned two of the Architectural CADD students, Nate Horner and Josh Abner, to tackle the project. After meeting with the Munday Center staff and board, the students created preliminary drawings and renderings. Those drawings were impressive enough and covered the scope of the project outline so well, that they were presented to the Owensboro City Commission who endorsed the project after seeing the possibilities outlined by the drawings created by the Horner and Abner.

Revisions of the design and the presentation drawings have begun after another meeting with Munday Center's board of directors and Vittitow to include the many ideas and refinements they have recommended. A formal multimedia presentation for the board of directors is being prepared by the students and will be presented at the next meeting in May.

With the aging of Americas baby boomers comes the growing need for these centers of activities. Active senior Americans can enjoy group or individual interests. This growing need is applicable to the Owensboro area with and aging population. Nearly 24,000 people, nearly half the Citys population, will be over the age of 60 by the year 2020. The current Munday Center is housed in a 1936 elementary school building that is costly to operate, expensive to maintain and is not easily accessible to senior citizens with many steps and a catacomb approach to room and office layouts. For more information on the OCTC CADD program please contac Steven R. Bailes at 686-4465 or steve.bailes@kctcs.edu; For more information on the Munday Senior Center please contact Tom Vittitow at (270) 687-4642 or dcsstom@owens.twcbc.com.