Author: mazdaPage 6 of 8

Reducing electricity consumption in homes to become as addictive as checking your blogstats?

The UK government has recently passed new legislation requiring electricity suppliers to fit free real time electricity price monitors in homes in a plan to massively reduce electricity…

Pre-‘fab’ wooden house in Hackney

Over the last few days the way we live, architechnophilia, and inhabit have all been covering a new pre-fab wooden house in Hackney designed by David Adjaye. Pre-fab…

Fischli and Weiss at the Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris

    Last night I went to the brilliant and rather amusing Fischli and Weiss exhibition “Flowers and Questions” at the Musée d’art moderne de la ville de…

Can’t get enough of Calatrava, Hertzog and De Meuron

Two articles on the way we live caught my attention… Since my final year project is well and truly rooted in the domain of tall buildings, I was…

God’s architect: Saint Antonio Gaudi?

Thanks for Mary for finding this article about the camapaign to confer sainthood upon architect Antonio Gaudi, creator of my favourite building site in the world: La Sacrada…

Presidentials

There has been an obvious lack of posts on this site for some time now.  I would like to be able to say that the reason for this…

Pigeon sympathy now out of fashion

It is possible that in my previous post I may have shown some sympathy toward pigeonkind.  Well, all that is over with, as this afternoon, one of their…

Birds of a feather mourn together

I noticed this dead pigeon at the bottom of the Rue de Faubourg St Denis.  It was surrounded by several other pigeons who were just staring at it. …

Gergiev and the LSO at the Salle Playel for a spot of Stravinski and Ravel

Last night I was lucky enough to get tickets to see the LSO perform at the Salle Playel. The auditorium was reopened back in September after being fully…

Ugly Duckling / Le Vilain Petit Canard

Wobbling la Passerelle Simone de Beauvoir

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69NA8E11IDM] I was invited on Wednesday to go and help wobble the Passerelle Simone de Beauvoir (previous posts here and here). The wobbling was being sollicted in order…

Berlin Wall lost in translation – can anyone help?

I am correcting a document that has been translated from French into English and I have hit upon a term that keeps cropping up, and I simply don’t…

Project update – meeting the architect and virtual handshakes + one for those who moan about London Underground

At the beginning of the week, the architects for the project that I am working on flew into town for an intensive week of meetings. Most of yesterday…

Tube Challenge – Project update: wobbly floors

Tube Challenge I always dreamed of doing this when I was a lonely and boring teenager. All the tube stations in one day. Thanks to Mary for sending…

Blog surfing – a make-over for engineers

Interesting comment on Geek Buffet about a make-over for engineers in the States. I have tried to add a British and French take on things.

Livic at three years old

Livic, the civil engineering newspaper of Imperial College, is now three years old. The fourteenth edition has just been published and I have to say it is the…

Pounds per square inch?? (project update)

Today I started getting into the nitty gritty of how to stop a floor from vibrating. When dimensioning the floor slab of a building, one of the considerations…

Opening of the Cité national de l’architecture et du Patirmoine

Last night Lorenzo (a fellow engineer from work) and I blagged our way into the opening of the permanent exhibition at the newly refurbished Cité National de l’architecture…

Progress…at last

After much rudderlessness, it seems I now have something fairly conretely (haha!) defined subject for my Projet de Fin d’Etudes. Up until yesterday, I had been increasingly frustrated…

Metro Entrance Gare St.Lazare

The other morning I found myself in northwestern central Paris around the Gare St.Lazare. This is not my normal stomping ground, so I took the time to go…

Zen and the art of building maintenance

  I am in the throws of reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Persig. In my view it is a philosophical book that challenges…

Bending beams and counting the cost

During these first few weeks of my placement I have been carrying out some fairly entry-level calculations on a forty-five storey tower. These follow on nicely from courses…

Final Year Project

Last Friday I handed in my last piece of course work at ENPC.  Despite having started my placement two weeks ago, last week I was still finishing off…

The end of bridges and the beginning of projects

After seven and a half years, I had my final exam as an undergraduate last Friday.  As final exams go, it counted for a minute part of my…

Womb with a view

Paris is slowly encircling itself in tramways. The latest tramway to open, connecting the disparate ends of several metro lines is the T3, which skirts inner Paris’ southern…

The Metropolisians

My mate Ronan is in a band called the Metropolisians. A month or so ago they won their heat in a battle of the bands contest for which…

Le vide grenier de l’onzième

We were recently asked in one of our French classes to write an article about a business in the style of short piece for a newspaper. The brief…

Too hot in Paris

Austrian windfarm Originally uploaded by eiffelover. It has been a gloriously warm day today in Paris. Too warm in fact. I wish more countries would follow Austria’s example…

American bridges number 1

There’s one thing that they do particularly well at the Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées (School of bridges and roads), and that is teaching how to build bridges…

Film uploaded to my new website

Check out my new website where I have posted a couple of movie clips. The first is a documentary that readers of this blog may remember I made…