After Corbu

See Ezra try to take food out of my (hypothetical) child’s mouth by downplaying the very real danger of the earthquake menace with his “Robots!  Robots!” flimflam.  In reality these things are not competitive, as the worst robots are brought by quake.
But really: setting most of the snark aside, unless you live or work in […]

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Even though I was told recently that real engineers design buildings not bridges (the view a side effect of the long standing structures vs. civil schism) — and I have a strong disdain for Dubai’s nouveau riche gaudiness — it would be a fun to work on one of these super-bridges.  Long-span structures make it […]

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Not Switzerland, as that country is known for its superior engineering*, and they’d probably scoff at this kind of patchwork, but Swiss Cheese. Below you see a beautiful concrete shear wall, essential for taking wind and earthquake loads from one level of a building to the next — helpful for people not dying! — […]

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Thought you should know.

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Because Verco W3 deck produces cool lighting:

Photo by an undisclosed engineer working on an undisclosed project.

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This post kicks off a new series that breaks open the dark underbelly of structural engineering. Full of facts, figures, & fatal catastrophes (!), you won’t want to miss these posts. So grab your slide rule, red pencil, and lack of social skills and come along!
In one of the famous engineering disasters that […]

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Photo from Docent X. Thanks!
i-eclectica brings news of the RMF radio station in Poland, which, though terrestrial, perfectly represents the space colony archtype: modular construction, domes, shiny steel, glass, and concrete, airlock-like entrances, exposed mechanical systems, etc. It makes the Trekkie in me squeal. However, I’m thankful they built it on Earth […]

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I found an excerpt from this graphic story (is “comic” an insult?) called 976 sq ft. at Life Without Buildings, which “tells the tale of a modern residential tower rising in a quickly gentrifying neighborhood” and it’s detrimental psychological impact on a couple across the street, and I felt a little guilty. Half of […]

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Work has been kicking my ass, and I’ve neglected my pontification. So sad. Instead, I offer you Spain boosterism:

Photo by tigrejones. Thanks!
I’m not a fan of the weird column capital detailing at La Sagrada Familia, but these tree columns are pretty cool. I’m not really clear on how one designs them […]

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Ohhhh, pretty shiny things!
Mostly this Flickr group is definitive proof that no matter how garish the building, it will look cool as a 3-point perspective. I mean, check this out:

Photo by syd delicious. Thanks!
A pretty boring box made compelling and dramatic by perspective (though that column capital is sweet detailing). Which is […]

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Spending most of my time around engineers, I forget that certain things aren’t common knowledge.  For example, I recently had to explain that buildings are not designed to survive earthquakes.  Rather, they are designed to not kill people during earthquakes, then afterwards we’ll knock em down and rebuild.
Engineers make this sound noble: “We’re in the […]

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“Old-timer, keeping up with the boys. Many structural workers are above middle-age. Empire State [Building]” Photograph by Lewis Hine, 1930 (check out more of his work at the National Archives).
I’ve been spending most of my work-time on the engineering for a 700-foot steel building, and so it’s neat to see all the small pieces and […]

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They have a lot of pieces.  A lot.  And no matter how standardized they look from the outside, each piece somehow ends up being just a little bit different.  And the steel fabricator sends you drawings of each one, based on the more general drawings you had sent them.  If you send hundreds, they send […]

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Picture from sam brown, explodingdog. Thanks!

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Warped, yielded steel from this issue of Engineering News, picture taken at the WTC. It somewhat illustrates what I was talking about below — the wide flange is bent and it look like some type of edge connection broke off, but the beam as a whole is still in one piece. Mostly, I […]

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By linking to this Robert Fisk article about questioning the 9/11 explanations, LitBrit produced quite a bit of commenter angst over at the House that Klein Built. As an engineer, I find the discussions of 9/11 steel collapse fascinating, and at the risk of revealing ignorance within my own field I want to wade […]

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