In keeping with tradition, this week I’ll be taking a look at the deepest structures in the world. Having celebrated the most visible of our achievements, it seems only fitting that I turn my figurative eye to where the majority of our engineering goes- the invisible!

I’ve had to cheat a bit to keep this list interesting. I’ve only allowed one borehole, or else we’ll just have oil explorations everywhere. Similarly, I’ve limited each mine to only be represented by its deepest shaft to save this becoming a tour of our deepest mines. As Google would put it- I’ve removed to similar duplicate results…

Schacht Asse II Repository

At 768m, this German ex-salt mine is already nearly as deep as most of the world’s tallest buildings are tall. Most of the depth was achieved in its first two years (1906-1908), however it was used as a potash and then salt mine until 1964. Now it lives out its days as a nuclear waste store.

Mizunami Research Laboratory

Another store for radioactive waste, this Japanese research project is now 1000m deep. The aim of the MIU Project is to research the techniques required in the burial (or geological) disposal of radioactive waste; one of the primary challenges in nuclear energy.

Sudbury Neutrino Observatory

Buried 2100m underground in Ontario, Canada lies a neutrino observatory. Constructed in 1999, this 18m ball of heavy water is tucked away from cosmic rays so that the neutrino interactions can be more easily distinguished. I’m not even going to attempt to explain this- so checkout Nobel Prise winner Art McDonald’s explanation.

TauTona Mine

The only still working mine in this list, the TauTona mine in South Africa is approximately 3900m deep. Initially sunk in 1957, this literal gold mine is one of the most profitable of its kind; even if the substantial depth means the rock face temperatures achieve 60deg!

Kola Superdeep Borehole

If the name doesn’t give you a hint of its depth, that this borehole was the basis of a myth that we dug a well to hell should be! Starting in 1970 the Soviet Union set off on a project to drill as deep as possible into the world’s crust. Achieving 12’262m in 1989, they still hold the record for the deepest artificial point on Earth; where they discovered mud ‘boiling with hydrogen’.

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I seem to have accidentally fallen into the pattern of having “the most something in the world!” articles on Sundays. So in an attempt not to disappoint, this week we’ll be tackling the tallest buildings in the world; perhaps the most architecturally driven of our achievements.

There’s a touch of ambiguity on what defines the tallest building, but I’m going to take the most honest definition- these are the structures that have the largest distance from ground level to top of structure. Sometimes this is contested, as it means that buildings that peter-out into light-weight artistic masts are discounted; however it’s still structure, so I’m counting it.

Willis Tower

More famously the Sears Tower, this 527m tower in the birthplace of the skyscraper, Chicago, was the tallest building in the world from 1973 to 1998. Still a national landmark, these days it’s more common to see it in the news for its daredevil cantilevered glass floor that periodically cracks!

One World Trade Center

One World Trade Center, or Freedom Tower, is a 546m tall statement. Sat on the site of the old twin towers it’s by far the tallest building in New York. And at $3.8 billion, it’s one of the most expensive buildings of all time.

Abraj Al Bait

This might well be my favourite on this list, just for how incredibly different it is from the rest! Unsurprisingly also known as the Makkah Royal Clock Tower Hotel, this 601m complex in Mecca, Saudi Arabia might not be the tallest, but it does boast the world’s biggest clock face!

Shanghai Tower

At 632m, the Shanghai Tower (in Shanghai, no less), is an impressive structure in its own right. However, perhaps it is most famous for sporting the world’s fastest elevators in a commercial building- travelling at nearly 75km/hr!

Burj Khalifa

It’s probably no surprise that this 830m tall structure is the tallests in the world. It’s had a long stint, since it’s completion in 2009, and doesn’t look like it’ll be stripped of its prestigious title until the Kingdom Tower (at 1000m) arrives in 2019.

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Tunnels; the less appreciated but just as impressive sibling of our famous bridges. Following last week’s attempt at discovering the world’s longest bridges, this week I’ll be giving the longest tunnels in the world a go. (Ed. I realised half way through this post that it’s much harder to find pictures of tunnels!)

Unlike bridges the ‘length’ of a tunnel is pretty easy to define, it’s the length that the tunnel tube runs. However, finding the longest is a bit harder. You see, the absolute longest tunnels in the world are effectively pipes; often similar in diameter, but, when it comes down to it, pipes. Similarly, pipes aside, metro systems are massive underground networks and so comfortably take the lead against your traditional ‘tunnel’.

So for today’s article I’m going to take a less abstract definition of a tunnel: A tunnel is a piece of infrastructure that allow traffic to pass under or through an obstacle. And with that heavily caveated description under our belt, here are the five longest “tunnels” in the world:

New Guanjiao Tunnel

I’m going to just go ahead and apologise for the photo now. But it seems that the passengers along this 32.6km rail tunnel between Qinghai and Tibet are curiously uninterested. Completed at the end of 2014 this is the longest rail tunnel in China, and at at 3300m above sea level- definitely a candidate for the highest tunnel in the world!

Lötschberg Base Tunnel

At 34.6km the Lötschberg Base Tunnel is not the only tunnel in this list to cut through the Swiss Alps. Despite being open since 2007 this tunnel is not, in fact, complete. Spiralling construction costs of the network means that the original intention for the whole tunnel to be double track was never realised. Phases 2 and 3 to promote the other two thirds of the tunnel from single track remain in political limbo.

The Channel Tunnel

With its seeds in an 1802 proposal, it wasn’t until 1994 that England was linked to France by this 50.5km engineering achievement. Possibly my favourite piece of trivia about the channel tunnel is that while the English TBMs were given dull alphanumeric names, the French TBMs were all named after women!

The Seikan Tunnel

The Seikan Tunnel is a 53.9km beauty that connects the north and central islands of Japan. Because I’m a civil engineer, I actually had a tour of this when I was on holiday. While it’s close to losing its distinction as the longest tunnel in the world, it’s still the deepest rail tunnel at 240m below sea level.

Gotthard Base Tunnel

At an amazing 57km km the Gotthard Base Tunnel takes the railway through the Swiss Alps. Although it won’t be open to commercial services until June, the structure is complete and so I’m giving it it’s rightful position on this list. That, and it has a gold sleeper laid to celebrate the completion of the track!

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I’ll be honest, I was going to do an article about the longest bridges in the world, but it all got very confusing very quickly. So I set my sights lower; the longest bridges in the UK. Some detailed research (lit. half hour on Google) has taught me that not only are we missing a queryable data source for our infrastructure, we’re also not really sure how to define how long a bridge is.

For this list I’m settling on defining length as the length the structure is bridging something, rather than largest spans, or spanned obstacle, or one of the other millions of random statistics available about bridges. So without further ado, here are (possibly*) the five longest bridges in the UK.

5. The Forth Road Bridge

Of course, the Forth Road Bridge has to come in fifth! With a total length of 2512m. Unfortunately cable deterioration means it’s being replaced with the Queensferry Crossing (which at 2700m will knock it off this list also)!

4. The QE II Bridge

The Queen Elizabeth II Bridge, or Dartford Toll, was built in 1991 at an impressive 2872m. Opening with the largest cable-stayed span in Europe; and interestingly the only bridge to span the Thames downstream of Tower Bridge.

3. Tay Rail Bridge

Our second Scottish entrant, the Tay Rail Bridge was the second built on that site; replacing the collapsed ‘light weight and low cost’  first attempt. Finished in 1883 it crosses the Firth of Tay with a total length of 3264m.

2. The Second Severn Crossing

In 1996 when the first Severn Bridge was full, they made a second. However the first had already taken the easy route, it had to take a wider, more meandering route, taking this cable stayed beauty to 5128m.

1. The Bromford Viaduct

Depressingly the longest bridge in the UK, weighing in at 5600m, spans Birmingham. The Bromford Viaduct, built in 1964-1972 allows the M6 to flow over the city from Castle Bromwich to Gravelly Hill; encompassing the original Spaghetti Junction!

Kudos to the runners up, the Forth Rail (2467m), Humber (2200m), Severn (1600m), Cromarty (1464m) and Eskine (1321m) Bridges, which aren’t exactly short. *I’m sure there’s a good bit of misinformation online about such things, so feel free to correct me in the comment section; especially if you think my top five are out!

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For those of you who don’t live London adjacent; the capital is remarkably close to getting its very own Garden Bridge– which is exactly what is sounds like: A tiny garden on a strip of artificial land straddling the Thames. While it remains controversial across the general public domain, the people who hate it the most- appear to be engineers.

With one of the main drivers being the massive engineering firm Arup, the project has the shape of something I’ve said civil engineers should be doing- taking control and pioneering the development of our built environment. And while it’s tempting to explain away these feelings as the cliché hatred engineers are supposed to harbour for anything that exhibits form before function- this week I’ve decided to take Darth’s advice and search my own feelings; to work out just why I hate that garden bridge…

It’s Not A Bridge, and It’s Not A Park

Not every noun should be trusted; peanuts are not nuts, NeverEnding Story has an end and the Garden Bridge isn’t a bridge. Ian Firth, of IABSE fame, has gone on record with the fantastic quote that, as a bridge, it serves neither artistic nor practical criteria; which I wholeheartedly agree with. You can’t really use it if your intention is simply to cross the river; it doesn’t have the capacity to cater for the peak commuter load of today- let alone the future city.

But if you admit it’s not a bridge; and looking back at their Future of Design talk last year, it’s clear it’s not designed to be– these criticisms start to fall down. It’s a tourist attraction. It is not, and this is the second key point, a park- it’s a garden. You can’t cycle across it (famously), form groups or (I suspect) even jog across it- but then; you can’t do that at the Eden Project– can you? Taken as a garden for perusal, that just so happens to span across the river, it starts to look a bit better.

It’s Publicly Funded

Accepting that it is not a piece of infrastructure, however, does raise the question; why are we paying for it. The official figure for the bridge is around £175m. Of that TfL are forking out £30m of their already stretched budget to contribute; while the treasury is effectively suspending tax on the construction by adding another £30m- again, against a backdrop of austerity. There’s also a danger that we’ll be hit by a £3.5m annual maintenance liability; the country is always the ultimate underwriter.

The rest is privately funded by investors who want to ‘give London a gift‘ through the Garden Bridge Trust. It’s worth noting, however, that as a charity, there’s a tax avoidance advantage to giving- arguably making the price paid by the public even higher through the lost corporation tax. Despite the public assistance, however, the bridge essentially remains private property– no guaranteed right of way, with closures for sponsored parties.

In an odd way it might have been better if the bridge was ticketed- at least that’d give it a more honest purpose. It would definitely reduce complaints from the rest of the country beyond the capital, who are facing a bill for a luxury they might never see. The London Eye provides a fantastic example of a private entity giving back to the surroundings- with the Southbank Centre receiving £500’000 yearly in rent from the structure. Making it free by getting us to prepay for our tickets under the heading “infrastructure” is arguably the most controversial bit of it all.

It’s Needlessly Expensive

At £25’000/m², you could get ten bridges and forty parks for the same price. But, returning to my original point- that it’s neither a park, nor a bridge, but a tourist attraction; the comparison isn’t as clear cut- why would private investors want to link themselves with 10 ordinary bridges or 40ha of blank green space across the country? At least half of the money doesn’t exist without something special.

What is important, though, is that independent estimates suggest the bridge could be built for a third of the cost. Although trust chair Paul Morrell replied to the claims churlishly blaming costs on “a long list of issues that you really do need to be working on the project to understand”; worryingly stating that the unusual decision to clad the bridge in “maintenance free” (a term all good engineers should fear) cupro-nickel was the term of a donation (which, it’s fair to assume, doesn’t cover the whole cost).

His response belies that this is a structure where value engineering just hasn’t been applied. This would be fine if the private structure didn’t require £60m of public money to fund (which, by the way, would cover the latest cuts on children’s mental health services); but as a profession we owe it to the tax payer (at least) to do our best to reduce the burden our works place on them, remember- ‘an engineer can do for a penny, what any fool can do for a pound…’ Even if you average the two estimates, you get something that doesn’t need to be publicly funded any more…

We’ve Been Told We Want It

The bridge, in its current incantation, began life as a competition run by TfL for an iconic scheme to act as a landmark that supports economic activity, and provide commuters at Waterloo options. It was a scheme initiated by the brains behind the Eremites cable car; possibly London’s only under-utilised piece of infrastructure. And the Garden Bridge won it.

As someone who walks past the site of the new bridge every day, I’ve never thought “well, wouldn’t be it nice to have a garden here…” In fact, it feels very much like Joanna Lumley and Co. have simply decided to build it- and therefore it’ll get built: planning permission seems to be being given at a remarkable rate– despite public uncertainty and the massive impact of the structure.

The truth of the matter is, however, that should it get built- it’s hard to imagine people not using it. Sure, the commuters will probably avoid it, but every tourist will end up meandering along the scenic route. The business case for the bridge makes an interesting read, quoting a return of 3.5 for the bridge; and while it sounds a little ill founded to me, I can’t deny that the Garden Bridge would be a great attraction to add to London’s arsenal…

It’s In An Odd Location

Why there was a tender to increase the options for people walking from Waterloo station is a bit of a mystery- it’s at the most densely bridged part of the Thames, and putting the bridge there threatens the view of St Pauls, which London holds oddly sacrosanct. As someone who walks across it every day- it’s not an unmanageably busy route, and it’s also not really in an area that needs economic development; the North Bank might be quiet, but it’s rich- the South Bank is a cultural hub for the area with everything from art galleries to pop-up theatres!

There are plenty of stretches along the river that are crying out for bridges and a bit of redevelopment- and it seems a shame to waste this scheme along a length that really doesn’t need it. A lot of detractors mention the uncrossed spans- but these are mostly at residential areas and are unlikely to really warrant an iconic structure. That said, something just outside the London Bridge area, or alongside Battersea could arguably be set to gain from the attraction.

So why do I hate the Garden Bridge? Well, it’s because people keep trying to pretend it’s a piece of public infrastructure; but it’s really not. And that’s OK. It’s a private theme park (nay, garden), and it is an interesting one- more a piece of art than a well engineered structure; but one I’d happily have paid £5.00 to wonder across. If they’d just have been honest about that at the start, then we would have ended up with a unique attraction (hopefully in a better location) without the bitter taste in our mouth.

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It’s that most magical time of the year (again), and what better way to celebrate, than a bit of seasonal engineering? Over the last few years I’ve already discussed the miraculous building loading that is Santa Claus and provided you all with an arguably dangerous Christmas Tree modeller; so for 2014 I’ve decided to tackle that fundamental engineering question:

Material Specifications

You might be surprised to learn that there’s a lot of research undertaken into the field of snow construction by various governmental institutions. Alas, this article isn’t going to become a Snowden (pun entirely intended) exposé into a dearth of secret projects to weaponise giant snow people à la Gundam Wing; the mundane truth is: If you want to understand an avalanche, you have to understand snow.

As a material, however, it appears to exist primarily to laugh in the face of structural models. I have now read more than I’ll ever need to know about the engineering properties of snow, and, quite frankly, it makes geotechnical parameters look like works of axiomatic precision. The problem stems from the fact that snow is just loosely packed (starting at around 10-30% the density of water) layers of tiny crystalline ice particles.

This means that it is a highly compressible material (in fact, you can simply crush it until the density approaches 80-90% of water, when it officially becomes ice), that is highly sensitive to temperature (it can melt/disaggregate and re-freeze/bond into new structures through sublimation and sintering) and behaves like everything from a linear-elastic solid to a visco-plastic liquid… To be honest, after losing a few hours of my life to reading about the wonder of snow mechanics; I was yearning for a simple material- like cake!

The thing is, unlike the civil engineering standards of concrete and steel, all these troubles add up to a material where the question isn’t just “will it ever fail?” but “how long do you want it to stand up before it fails; in seconds, preferably…”. If there are any experts in snow engineering who would like to chip in, at this point, that would be perfect- but until then; here are the mechanical properties I’ve deciphered for densely packed snow at sub-zero temperatures that will remain “true” for a given value of time:

• Compressible strength: 3 MPa
• Shear strength: 1 MPa
• Tensile strength: 1 MPa
• Poisson’s ratio: 0.3
• Low creep strength*: 70 kPa
• Density: 7 kN/m³

*The low creep strength is the limiting stress at which the strain rate remains constant; the snow would not start life in a state of failure. It is, however, so low that I doubt we’ll achieve much with it.

The World’s Largest Snowman

The world’s tallest snowman was actually a woman, 32.21m tall, and built by the residents of Bethel, Maine, USA. Right of the bat, however, I’m going to disqualify this entry; somewhat ironically, on the grounds of Architecture.

You see, Bethel (which I assumed they called her) the giant snow woman already encompasses the most efficient engineering form. As I discussed when attempting a similar feat with cake- whenever you’re going for “the world’s tallest”, a pyramid is pretty much the best way to build high for those to whom the words ‘structural efficiency‘ are just a set of random sounds. And although a snow man is hardly anatomically correct, a cone just doesn’t cut it in my book.

We can’t keep building pyramids…

Just for completeness, however: Confined snow under compression tends towards ice. Noting previous research into this topic, the compressive strength of ice is around 8.8MPa. As a rough guide, the loading distribution of a pyramid allows you to build three times higher than the equivalent tower. We can also take an estimate that the snow changes linearly from light and fluffy, to solid ice; essentially making the average density 60% that of water:

As that’s a sizeable fraction of the diameter of the earth, and around about the thickness of the Antarctic ice sheets (so logically, we should be able to go even higher!); I can’t shake the feeling that maybe Maine should have put a bit more effort in…

Failure Mechanisms

A proper snowman is two balls, one a top the other. The bottom ball is required, by Euclid (et al), to be 1.618 times the size of the top; or else our mega-structure will end up offending sensitive eyes. To ensure a good foundation, we’ll allow a zone the same diameter as the head to form a cylindrical pad for the base of the snowman. A similar proportion of bearing area will be provided between the head and the body:

Being Brunel doesn’t make snowmen, but if it did…

At a glance, this gives us two inter-related failure mechanisms (which highlight why the conical-woman is cheating): Either the sides of the body fall off in shear, or it cracks apart as the head pushes through the body and causes it to expand (a rather fatal example for a use of Poisson’s ratio!).

How Big Can You Build A Snowman?

So I’ve waffled on enough; time to take a guess. I mean, er, report my findings after a detailed period of analysis*…

*Ed: It was at this point in the article that I realised I’d picked a stupidly difficult piece of geometry to calculate for! For the sake of simplicity our structure is two spheres in volume; the bearing areas are perfect circular planes and are connected to form an internal core. We’ll negate accessories loading.

Sample shows tensile failure; try again…

The first failure mechanism is caused by the weight of the head cleaving the body in two. As the body ‘squishes’ (technical term) it begins to bulge, and creates tensile forces along the centre of the body ball; exceeding the 70kPa limiting creep stress at 27.5m.

However we’re being a little unfair here, the compressive force decreases the strain rate as our snow packs up to much stronger ice. I’m therefore moved to say that, as long as you think of our snowman as a transient structure, we can use the full elastic tensile limit of 1MPa. From some very rough calculations (lit. unfounded gut-feeling) I’d say it’d last a good few hours in this condition; especially with a bit of maintenance.

Test displays shear failure- try again…

Then comes shear. It’s the sections hanging off the supported bit of our snowman that are causing the shear; so we’ll say that’s everything not within the blunt cone formed between the base and the neck. This means that the weight of the head just transfers in bearing down to the base, but ~60% of the body sphere volume is supported in shear; hanging off the middle. Unexpectedly, we can reach about 130m until the shear passes the limiting creep stress.

No snow men were hurt- except this one…

As the capacity in shear is based on cohesion, it is very sensitive to creep strain- but If you don’t mind the snowman existing for only a couple of seconds, we can push the shear utilisation up to the elastic limit too. So finally, we come to the final failure- compression. Remember I talked about the wonder of snow becoming ice and getting incredibly strong last time? Well, that’s only helpful if you don’t care about the shape (i.e. it becoming a pyramid). So we’re limited to our 3MPa before the snow starts to rupture and crush (n.b. because of the poisons ratio of 0.3, the tensile limit still isn’t exceeded)- which happens at around 320m.

So there you have it, if you want a snowman that’ll last you through the night, stop at 27.5m, if you just want to prove a point- feel free to wind it all the way up to 320m; just don’t come complaining to me when it collapses before you get a photo…

Just for my sadist enjoyment, I’ve decided to attach the spreadsheet containing my workings this year.

Preliminary Snow Man Sizing Spreadsheet

I shall look forward to all the comments pulling apart my methodology, choice of values and formatting choices.

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I’m sure you’ve all been at the edge of your seats waiting for the second part from the highlights of the IABSE 2014 Future of Design conference; and for that I can only apologise- some times life gets in the way. I expect it’s a good sign, however, that a day long conference results in enough highlights to span more than one article.

In the second half of the conference there was a series of competitive presentations by actual young designers; keen to share their papers about the innovative design, or structural research they have undertaken. There’s also a short discussion on a topic pertinent to the structural engineering profession. I’ve given it my best to try and capture the key points- but, like most short talks; there’s a wealth of technical detail that makes a summary difficult to achieve.

Mungo Stacy (Parsons Brinckerhoff)

Mungo compared the principles of civil engineering to the famous commandments of product design by Dieter Rams: it should be innovative, useful, aesthetic, understandable, unobtrusive, honest, long-lasting, designed to the last detail, sustainable and efficient. By accepting this, the future of design has us becoming leaders in design technology, building a sustainable future of efficient structures.

To me the more pertinent part was a discussion of engineers and our perceived lack of value within society. He argues that we cannot just demand to be valued, but must prove ourselves- remembering that once we were the pioneers. The built environment is the fruit of our design and we have an obligation to it; we cannot continue soliciting our skills to build whatever the clients demand, off-loading our responsibilities to politicians and ‘quick-win’ economics- we must return to acting as custodians for it, and there is where we will find respect again.

Young Designers

Jose Fernandes (Parsons Brinckerhoff), Prejay Patel (Mott MacDonald), David Knight (Flint & Neill), Elyes Aidi (Parsons Brinckerhoff), Katerina Vatti (Tony Hogg Design), Despina Tsertikidou (WSP)

This segment of the event celebrated some achievements of younger designers; who all presented papers as part of a larger competition. Jose started by introducing us to a tool he has created as part of his research into bridge dynamics. Intriguingly it allows engineers to get a quick indication of the effects of dynamic loading on simple bridges using nothing more than Excel! Prejay’s talk took us in an unexpected direction, where he discussed the finite element analysis of the pelvis- and how the use of similar ‘meso-scale‘ modelling could help engineers more efficiently assess complex structures.

David gave a talk on a project he had worked on; the Greenwich Reach Swing Bridge. What made this structure noteworthy was the use of a flat plate diagonal truss thru-section, which increased the buckling capacity by 50%. Elyes then shocked us all by bringing in a bit of the Old Wye Bridge– presumably to prove how urgently it needed repairs. More interesting than the technical side of the works, however, was its change management: which involved linking in a live spreadsheet log of defects into the analysis tools.

Katrina’s presentation focused on a field of engineering I’m almost completely ignorant of: fabric membrane structures. What it really highlighted, however, was the effects of ‘architecture-led-engineering’: Where the resulting structure was completely irrational; requiring each and every double layered panel to be individually analysed and designed. Finally Despina talked us though her involvement with the massive London Bridge Station upgrade project; and the difficulties of managing substantial programme pressures, working with partial information and dealing with the outfall of assumptions, which comes with working on our historic infrastructure!

Discussion Panel

Colin Wilson (GLA), Mark O’Connor (WSP), Clive Atkinson (Mott MacDonald), Karen Cook (PLP Architecture)

Quipping that “London got exciting in the 2000’s”; the view of the panel discussing “Designing the London Skyline” was clearly that the rise of tall-buildings is a good thing. Perhaps more surprising was the discovery that our audience bucked the stereotype of the ‘ordered’ engineer and voted nearly unanimously in favour of the fluid, dynamic and frankly disorganised nature of our city arrangement (that so aptly reflects our historic legal approach to planning) against the more precise ‘zoning‘ found in other cities.

Karen did, however, express a bit of frustration at how slow our system can be; noting that a partial pre-approval approach would be needed to help supply meet demand. The view of the panel was that London is beginning to mature, and the pubescent need for each of our tall buildings to be special (Walkie Talkie, anyone?) is ebbing. City planners are also getting better at negotiating; ensuring that every high-rise either provides affordable accommodation, or contributes to the city as a whole through parks and public infrastructure, etc.

Much of the discussion focused on the life of the buildings (25-50 years for most commercial offices- arguably a waste) and the exclusivity of them; spending our lives designing flats we could never afford. Interestingly Mark noted that this current tendency to mega-tall (40-75 storey) premium high-rises is likely to be a bit of a blip, and that the medium storey towers of the 60s are likely to have a second coming as the city attempts to house its workers.

Michel Virlogeux (Independent)

After last year’s performance by Mike Schlaich, and now Michel’s truly entertaining talk; I’m forced to conclude that engineers on the continent enjoy the profession more than we do! Like other engineering celebrities; I’m never going to do this man justice in a few paragraphs, and I’d really recommend trying to find a talk by him to truly appreciate the experience!

Michel’s talk focused on his experience doing something I’ve said you should never do; making a suspension bridge to carry rail. With the desire to create the slender decks that you would expect from the farther of the Milau Viaduct; Michel won the competition to the new Bosporous Bridge by throwing away the double-decker configuration typically used to provide adequate stiffness, and instead created a cable-stayed/suspension hybrid.

Looking at the 1400m span, Michel quickly identified that the maximum deflections from the heavy combined rail/road loading occurred at the quarter points, and worked to augment the suspension bridge with cable stayed lengths extending out from the pylons; providing enough stiffness while maintaining a razor-thin deck. This system allowed him to find perfect balance in the system under permanent loads; supporting the rest (in his own words) is like finding the cost of VAT!

Mark Whitby (DMagW)

One of the nice things about the Future of Design event are the talks from seasoned engineers who still think that working with structures is fun. Since selling whitbybird back in 2007, Mark, our presidential Olympian (if Wikipedia is to be believed) has set out to take back ownership of our structures, and have fun doing so.

Through a tour-de-force of his more recent projects, Mark has seemingly enjoyed playing with structural forms; although he does acknowledge that architects are needed for the aesthetics (who else knows how to do hand-railing?!) Joking that coming up for new bridge designs is easy, a core theme has been how with working out the detail of every new bridge comes another idea to be investigated and attempted for the next design.

Kirsten Henson (KLH Sustainability)

For Kirsten, the main challenge isn’t the engineering behind making things sustainable; but getting everyone from the clients down to the contractors to buy into the idea. There’s a misnomer that ‘sustainability’ is something you add to the project; an unfortunate set of hoops that you have to jump through, which only makes everything more expensive. Some ways of thinking, however, aren’t helping; and she lamented the difficulties she had using a foam mix for inspection chambers because, despite being around from the 1960’s, it was “unproven”.

The art, according to Kirsten, is learning to use the right language. Clients won’t care that BRE such-and-such states that this should be done, or know a CEEQUAL award if it fell out of a tree onto them; but they will know how having a sustainable building fits in with their core business strategy. Using the new BskyB campus as an example, she explains how KLH engaged with the Corporate Sustainability Team to ensure the sustainability of this major new development was a client-led achievement.

Find the cost saving (think land remediation) and health and safety benefits sustainable technologies can bring, and getting buy-in from a contractor is easy. Designers, she said, have a responsibility to not just hide behind the standards, but to really consider the opportunities around them- to ensure lazy specifications to hinder later sustainability options. She finished by cajoling the room to make sure they tell the public just how good we are- silently working small miracles will get us nowhere!

The next IABSE Future of Design event will be in Manchester on the 27th of March. I’ll be aiming to go (company permitting), and if you can, I’d really recommend you do too- if only for the enviable opportunity to meet myself…

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Every year I go to the IABSE Future of Design conference (sample size: 2 years). It has a good selection of speakers, but more than that- it has a good selection of attendees. It’s nice to meet people the same level as me in different firms, who are at least interested in engineering enough to take a day off work to hear about it.

For those of you who know nothing of the IABSE Future of Design events, they’re day long conferences aimed primarily at young designers; although the speakers are typically experienced members of the industry. Unlike many conferences, however, the aim of most talks is simply to celebrate structural design; rather than honing in on a specific technicality- or even field!

As is my wont, this, and the next, post will skim over some of the highlights of the day- for those of you who didn’t attend, and those of you who turned up but were distracted by the pastries.

Josef Hargrave (Arup)

It seems apt that a day on the future of design should begin with someone whose whole career is based on the development of techniques and tools to help target markets for the future. Quipping that ‘change is constant’, and only those that adapt will thrive and survive; Josef outlined his view of the future. At the end of his talk, however, Josef acknowledged that our industry is slow to change because of the relatively long life of our products, and the high risks involved- and he was unsure of what we could do to keep up with the pace of technological and scientific development.

With the widespread accessibility of social media, feedback is immediate and technology allows people to react instantly. According to Josef this will lead to more user driven and democratic design; tooling the communities affected to design their own environment. Engineering will begin to focus more on resilience and adaptation as climate change increases the frequency of extreme events; and similarly resource pressure will lead to a focus on a built environment that produces as much as it consumes. That is Josef’s considered opinion; and to be honest- it’s not hard to imagine it coming to pass…

Francis Archer & Phillip Hall-Patch

Arup & Heatherwick Studio

Not surprisingly Arup’s Garden Bridge was one of the more controversial talks of the event. Crossing the Thames at Embankment, the 300m long, two-span balanced cantilever bridge has been mathematically designed to appear as if it sprouts, like the branches on a tree, from its two piers. The biggest challenge seemed to surround creating a “maintenance free” design life of 120 years for the structure (a phrase I was once told to severely distrust); requiring a monolithic shell of copper-rolled steel. Designed to ‘delight’, I’ll be doing a follow up fairly soon, trying to figure out why this bridge is so divisive.

Julia Barfield (Marks Barfield)

Architect of the London Eye and the Kew Garden tree-top walkway; Julia’s talk was surprisingly modest- although she won me over fairly quickly after stating that “weathering steel is beautiful”. Talking about the Kew Garden tree-top walkway, she explained the focus on keeping the structure a kit of parts; repetitive, slender and adaptable (something that would later help after a last minute route change); and the struggle of getting close enough to a tree without killing it.

Currently she is seeing a project her firm had initiated, the Brighton i360, enter construction. Following the London Eye, she says, every city now seems to want a tourist wheel- but few can really sustain them. The solution for Brighton is a slender needle/capsule vertical lift tower; providing unrivalled views of Brighton, the Channel (and the Isle of Wight, for some reason). Most interesting to me is the construction sequence, which can only be described as a vertical launch- each piece being slotted in at ground level, and then lifted to form a space for the next!

John Cutlack (Flint & Neill)

John started his talk with a reminder that “Structural Engineering is Fun!” He then proceeded to prove it, by taking example of structures he’d been involved with during his career. From floating cars to Venturi chamber shaped bridges, giant model American Footballers [ed. well, I think it was, but Google is showing a blank] that crouched in the wind and climbing walls for land rovers- each example seemed more tantalisingly outlandish than the next.

A common theme across all of the structures he had been involved with was that it was the structure that formed the architecture. Lamenting the separation of architects and engineers that occurred with the industrial revolution, John made a plea for younger engineers to get involved with conceptual design- where there is free reign to think and experiment; too often they get bogged down with detail and then find themselves in management- ultimately missing the chance to have some fun with their skills.

Keith Brownlie (BEaM)

Bridge design, fashion, and innovation formed the crux of Keith’s talk. Starting with the assertion that fashion is circular, technology is linear and construction is stationary (constrained); he asked why don’t bridges all look the same? His answer was context- we have bridges that create context (such as the proposed Garden Bridge) and bridges that engage with the local context (like the Kew Garden walkway). Talking of where the edge-fashion is today for bridges, he identifies ‘logo potential’, view from space (given Google Maps) and turning soffits into areas in their own rights as sources of inspiration.

Ralph Parker & Tim Lucas

Price & Myers

This talk focused on the conceptual birth, engineering development and eventual construction of a sculpture at Heathrow airport. The concept was to build a continuous volume representing the animation of a plane doing an inversion stunt. Tim’s work focused on realising this as a structural system; employing the increasingly necessary engineering skill of big-data management to collate thousands of points down to a real volume; which could then be rationalised into a physical object.

To me, it was the role of the unnamed contractor that proved most interesting. It had turned out that they had cunningly required drawings be provided for all parts. This led the guys to discovered that they had designed something that needed 35’000 drawings to build. That (seemingly alone) is what spurred them to truly address the buildability; reducing the construction complexity into support cassettes, which could be assembled like jigsaws from pieces that were automatically cut using a link between the software and the laser machine- although it still resulted in sections that took three hours to lift…

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It’s that time of year again; the annual IABSE Future of Design event is looming. I’ll be going, and you should be coming too. Whilst a lot of industry conferences and events are aimed at the engineers with a good few years under their belt- the IABSE Future of Design event targets young designers. More than anything, this makes for a much more relaxed day- as you’ll be rubbing shoulders with people who have a similar degree of experience, which makes them infinitely easier to strike up a conversation with.

Like Glastonbury (but without the musical camping); the Future of Design 2014 event programme is still shrouded in mystery. A good few speakers have been announced, however, including the engineer behind the Milau Viaduct and a suspiciously large number of people involved with the Garden Bridge that Arup have planned for London. If you want to know what to expect, check out my write up of last year.

Tickets range from £25 to £40 (depending on your rank and company), and this is exactly the sort of the CPD that people working towards chartership should be able to justify to their employer. More than that, it’s a fun day and gives you some perspective on what the rest of the industry is doing.

Click on the button below to find out more, and buy tickets (and no, I don’t get commission).

Buy Your IABSE Future of Design 2014 Ticket

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I love my indie games; there’s something about the smaller studios that gives their creations so much more life than their AAA counterparts. My latest fancy has been the superb Transistor, which you should probably go and play right now (work be damned). As I made my way though Supergiant’s wonderfully crafted world, however, I found myself thinking about the structural engineering behind it.

You see, one of the core motifs of Transistor is the notion of self adapting structures: Buildings and infrastructure that alter their states, with apparent sentience, to cope, survive and provide for scenarios beyond their original usage and design. Is it a glimpse of the future, a pipe dream, or maybe even a reflection of something we have already?

Adaptive Engineering Today

Backing away from the hypothetical; the works of civil engineers are already regularly adapted. They are retro-fitted to comply with new standards, provide greater capacity, or to extend their working lives. In fact, this ‘manual’ adaptation forms a major part of the global engineering market. Similarly, in the UK at least, Managed Motorways are becoming the norm; where traffic can be quickly controlled and guided to maintain a more constant flow (which is nothing new- look at Sydney Harbour Bridge’s tidal-flow running.)

One could argue that many of our structures already ‘adapt’ to ‘unusual’ scenarios- through a combination of redundancy (those partial factors) and vigorous loading envelopes. In a similar vein they are protected from disproportionate collapse when under attack by ‘adapting’ to use alternative load paths. These examples, however, aren’t really adaptation in the 7-of-9 ‘sci-fi’ sense; they are more mundane- statistical fail-safes to make the unexpected expected.

Adapting For Tomorrow

To go beyond manual/redundant adaptation we need to solve two problems, first: our structures need to become intelligent, and second: they must be capable of physically manipulating themselves. Have hope, however, as work already exists in these fields, which might just pave the way to a Transistor like existence; although probably not for a while yet…

Intelligence in structures is already appearing in the digital world (where the issue of physical manipulation is inherently solved). On a day to day basis programs like Revit are making our structures parametric– building in the knowledge of how to develop and (to a limited extent) extend themselves. Researchers are already pushing this further with fabrication based geometric constraints and rudimentary form-finding algorithms that will one day be capable of establishing these parametric formulations themselves…

These developments, however, will have to make the leap from the digital world into ours before self-adaptation becomes a reality. This challenge is, arguably, a much harder one than finding intelligence. In the real world entropy rules, and you cannot create something from nothing. For the majority of contemporary engineering materials, it is not possible to perform in-situ reversions from their working state (steel will not flow into new shapes, and concrete can’t re-cast).

Perhaps the closest thing we have is 3D printing. It’s already being used to construct houses, and in combination with the growing wave of construction-bots it is feasible to consider a slow adaptation system; where the structural intelligence commands these bots. Until a material is found, however, that can be freely replicated and manipulated this process will be slow: ‘adaptation’ through demolition and retrofitting- arguably worse-off then the current situation (as we’ll all be out of a job!).

The closest I’ve found to a truly adaptive structure (rotating floors, and moving façades aside) is the SmartShell; a lightweight timber shell designed by the University of Stuttgart. Sure, it cannot adapt beyond its nature; but it has reached exceptional efficiencies by being able to manipulate its support conditions, and therefore internal stresses, on-the-fly. The ability to adapt means that a 10x10m area can be roofed by only 40mm of material. Pretty impressive…

It’s not quite SkyNet, but we’re getting there… (Photo: Bosch Rexroth)

So who knows? Maybe Supergiant really do know what the world will be like in 40 years time…

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