The Institution of Civil Engineers, in celebration of the 250th anniversary of the birthThomas Telford, has launched a blog in the name of that great Scottish engineer. The blog will contain extracts from diary entries and letters by Telford, the ICE’s first president. I have to confess that though Telford is credited with thousands of structures, a great number of which remain standing, I do not know enough about him. I hope that this blog will help me fill some gaps!
Today I sat the final exam for what has probably been the most enjoyable course that I have studied during the last four years, the ambitiously titled “History of Construction”. The course took place not at Les Ponts, but at the neighbouring architecture school EAMLV
The lecturer expertly lead us through building sites from Egypt to Millau and described building materials as diverse as granite and linoleum. But what got me really excited about the course was being in a room full of real live architects. All those asymmetrical haircuts, those interesting glasses. From the outset I fully expected to see my own haircut lose its symmetry and that my sight should deteriorate sufficiently for me to make a purchase at the opticians. I imagined myself sitting among the trendies, smoking cigarettes with my new friends (smoking is clearly an initiation rite).
In the end, it didn’t quite work out like that. On the plus side, the lectures were excellent and really quite inspiring: it constantly reminded me of all that stuff about why I went into engineering. I have to say that unlike my other exams here, this one wasn’t such a hit and miss affair. But lets look at the bad side… I left the architecture school for the last time looking less trendy than I did at the outset (I got dressed in the dark this morning), my eyesight is just as good as it was before, and I haven’t managed to give up “not smoking”. As for new architect friends, well there was this one guy who I was chummy with, who used to say hi and stuff, but when it came to saying goodbye, both of us knew there was no need to exchange emails. All I could muster when shaking his hand was a feeble “on se revoit sur un chantier un jour” (see you one day on a building site). Disaster.
When Haussmann was busy tearing down and rebuilding large swathes of Paris, he wasn’t doing it all by himself. His chief engineer was this fellow, M Alphand. In this portrait by Alfred Roll, he is standing on the building site of the Petit Palais in 1888. Appropriately, it is now hanging in pride of place in the Petit Palais. As far as our history of art lecturer is aware, it is in the only portrait of an engineer in Paris.
The Petit Palais is an interesting place, although not as immediately so from a structural point of view as its glass-domed big brother opposite, the Grand Palais. This mock classical building has frescoes on its ceiling that, first time round, failed to draw my attention. On a second lap however, I was invited to take a closer look at these paintings. Sure, there were the cherubs floating around, but the clouds in which they were flying were not in fact clouds, but smoke rising from factories in one corner, and a steam train in the other. Progress!
We have just had the first of two earthquake engineering exams, and this one was hard! Revision for the exam was doubly frustrating: firstly because the key topics that we had been told would be on the list had been well hidden among three dense handouts; secondly because of all the twenty topics on the list, only two came up. Still, I am at least pleased that I didn’t waste too much time revising last night as none of the subjects that I would have studied came up anyway. This may be a reactionary comment admittedly, but I seriously advise anyone thinking of coming here next year to think twice about studying this subject.
This exam has been preventing me thinking about the rest of the term and now that it is over things are looking more rosy! Next week Dan and I will be sitting the History of Construction exam at the architecture school. I don’t think I have ever looked forward to an exam more: we will be asked to draw and annotate sketches of buildings ranging from the pyramids to the Milleau Viaduct. I do this kind of thing on holiday!
More exams like this please, and less involving a calculator.
Today I developped the film that I shot while in the south of France over Christmas. It is magical watching the images appear out of nothing in the developping fluid. I was really happy with this set and I hope to be printing some full sized images tomorrow rather than just a contact sheet. ENPC paid for the film and for all the developping chemicals, and now that I know who holds the key to the dark room, there is no stopping me…
hello readers I would like to apologise for the lack of posts of late. This blog was meant to be about engineering and my life in Paris. Well, it seems that I have been rather too successful at engineering myself a life in Paris to have the time to write it all down. But all that will change as New Year and its concomitant resolutions beckon. In the mean time, joyeuse fête! Eiffelover 
Monday 30th continued
When it comes to rail travel in Eastern Europe, Budapest is a hub, which is why this is the third time I have arrived in Budapest by train. I had tried to pick a train time that would have allowed me to have a cheap as chips massage at the thermal baths but it didn’t work out in the end. Budapest also seems to be where fast western european trains stop and slow eastern european trains start. Still on the “Avala”, I appeared to be the only passenger coming from Vienna who stayed on the train. I was accompanied to the border by a lady with enormous reusable tesco bags that seemed to take up half our cabin.
The train trundled south at a sometimes painfully slow pace. The line is only single track so numerous times we had to wait in sidings to let a terribly important train carrying logs go the other way. The platforms also seem to stop in Budapest: anyone getting off the train had to make an heroic leap down to the ground, luggage being caught by loved ones below. I passed time until the border in the luxurious and ludicrously overstaffed restaurant car. I was the only customer and as I drank my coffee, the head waiter, his assistant and the chef sat down to a three course meal on the table next to me.
I think that is in Asne Seierstad’s book “With Their Backs to the World” (that same author wrote “The Bookseler of Kabul”) that one the people featured quips that there must be more border guards patrolling the frontiers within the former Yugoslavia than in the rest of Europe combined. Becoming now almost a frequent traveller in these parts, I must be becoming familiar to many of them, although admittedly they are more likely to recognise me in my pyjamas as I always seem to cross the border in the middle of the night. These midnight border crossings come with a pang of fear that I am going to be kicked off the train for not having the right visa, despite that little access-all-areas purple book that I keep in my back pocket. Indeed last summer when we were travelling from Belgrade to Greece some Canadians were kicked off the train in the middle of the night at the crossing because they didn’t have the write paperwork.
This time however I was crossing in the middle of the afternoon and the whole experience was a whole lot less worrysome although the border guard did question me for some time on my reasons for going to Belgrade. Safely into Serbia, I transferred to the cabin of an elderly lady where I had spotted that there was a socket from which I could charge my camera. My Serbo-Croat is not that hot and she didn’t speak any English. Nevertheless we were able to communicate to some extent. I found out that she was called Elizabeth and was from Bosnia but was now living in Novi-Sad (of excellent music festival fame). I think she understood that I was an engineer. And when I told her I was going to Romania she started waving her hands above her head in alarm. It’s amazing how far you can get without words. (I later foound out that my Serbian is even worse than I thought: upon verification with higher authorities that evening, it appears that I had told Elizabeth that my name was English and I had asked her if she spoke Oliver. Oh well, at least I tried)
We said our goodbyes at Novi Sad, by which time it had already grown dark. There are not many lights in that part of the Serbian countryside and there was nothing but blackness outside my window. Whereas up until Novi Sad, I had always had fellow passengers and hence, somehow, their company, I felt quite alone on that last bumpy hour of the journey. Finally the train rattled its way across the Danube and slowly made its way into Belgrade station. There to meet me on the platform with warm embraces were Ana and Barbara. It had been almost a year since we first met on the IACES exchange to Ljubljana. After a year of promises to come and see them I had finally arrived in their home city, quite exhausted after twenty-eight hours of travel, but with still enough energy for some celebratory beers. Geeverli! (Ana, please advise on the correct spelling!)
Monday 30th October
I must have slept well in my reclining seat as I completely slept through Munich and Saltzburg, although I had been aware of many different people having sat beside me during the night. When I awoke the train – still the Orient Express – was pulling out of Linz. When I had gone to sleep I had been surrounded by people with coats pulled up over their heads to help them sleep but by the time we left Linz these had all been replaced by smart Austrian commuters tapping away at their laptops. It was all rather disconcerting. Between Munich and Vienna the train snakes along the foothills of the Alps, a beautiful site to wake up to. Leafy suburbs appeared and then Vienna rolled into view, looking pristine in the morning sunshine. With an hour and a half to kill I stretched my legs in the vicinity of the station. The first thing that stuck me was how cold the air was and I was cold wearing both of the coats that I was travelling with. Only they day before I had been in Paris wearing a t-shirt!
Wien Westbahnhoff is a bright and airy mordernist station with large windows that bathe the quitely ciruclating masses in morning sunlight. All around me seem very relaxed, almost noislessly moving from platform to platform. Time for a coffee and to stock up on provisions and then it was straight onto my next train, the 10am “Avala” to Belgrade.
In contrast to the western side of Vienna the landscape to the Danube Valley to the east is wide and flat. Between the capital and the border I saw hundreds of windturbines slowly turning over in the breeze. At the border with Hungary I caught sight of the river and on the opposite bank, Slovakia. On the Hungarian side of the border, the river continues eastward for about an hour afterwhich, then it makes a sharp right and heads south to the capital. By 1 o’clock we’ve arrived at Budapest Keleti station.
This afternoon’s lecture on earthquake engineering was a struggle. The mountains of photocopies that we were given didn’t really match up with what the lecturer was saying, which had the effect of further lowering Friday afternoon lecture attentiveness. I was however paying attention when the expert before us showed us a map of Europe showing the magnitudes and location of the major earthquakes that have hit the Mediterannean region. The largest seismic event shown I seem to remember wiped Lisbon off the map in during the 1700s. A line of seismic events can be drawn from the mid Atlantic, through the Straits of Gibraltar, joining the dots all the way to Naples, neatly following the southern edge of the Eurasain tectonic plate. When there is an erathquake Eurasia and Africa move relative to one another along this fault line.
So why am I giving you this geography lesson? Well I have just read in the ICE newsletter that a company has made a bid to build a tunnel under the Straits of Gibraltar (http://www.ice.org.uk/knowledge/spec_news.asp?ARTICLE_ID=1622). At 44km it will be longer than the Channel Tunnel. What’s more, the depth of the tunnel ( the Channel Tunnel is relatively shallow at only 50 odd metres below sealevel ) and the fact that the tunnel will have to pass through several different types of soil make the project barely feasible.
But there is no mention of what steps are going to be taken to make the tunnel earthquake proof. What is going to happen when the bit of the tunnel in the Eurasian plate moves one metre up down left or right relative to the African plate? As far as I am aware, tunnels aren’t like buses; they don’t come in ‘bendy’. (http://www.tfl.gov.uk/tfl/press-centre/image-gallery/gallery.asp)
Finally I would like to know what the tunnel is going to be called. I think that the Gibraltar Strait Tunnel – or even the Gibraltar Bendy Tunnel (geddit?) is unfeasible because it contains the word Gibraltar and so I am sure it will kick of a squabble between the British and Spanish governments. The Algerceras tunnel is a no go because no one outside of Spain will be able to pronounce Algerceras. Which leaves the only other option. The International Tunnel of Tangiers. It is catchy and whats more, it reclaims Tagniers’ former standing as an international city. Unfortunately I don’t think my name is going to stick as it I think it will be a long time before a tunnel linking ‘North’ and ‘South’ is named after a place in Africa.
Last week I got wind of a course at ENPC in photography. After a little research I found out that it is actually an advanced course for people learning English, the content of which happens to be photography. Since the course takes place during one of my free slots, I tried this week to sneak along. I asked the teacher whether, given my level of English, I could sit at the back and listen. He happily accepted me onto the course but rather than sit at the back and listen he wants to speak up as afterall two native English speakers are better for the class than just one.
The first class I went to was on James Natchwey. We wathced a documentary on how he works and I have to say I was stunned. Have a look at his website to see what I mean: www.jamesnatchwey.com
There is a class blog where we can give each other tips on technique as well as use it to display our photos. I have put a link to this in my blog roll. Most excitingly, the college has a dark room so I will be developping some of my own photos in the not to distant future.
Although I have now been living in Paris for five or so weeks, I only had my first full week of lectures last week. We had to give some indication of the courses that we wanted to take back in April. Ever since then I had been vaguely apprehensive about the classes I would be taking – a mixture really between the fear that they would be too hard mathematically and the fear that I just wouldn’t understand a word of what was being said. Well after one week of full lectures I am happy with the selection so far. In “Conception of Dangerous Strucutres” (there is Ronseal element to some of these course titles http://www2.ronseal.co.uk/) we will be spending the first three weeks looking at designing dams. Then we will move on to nuclear power stations and finally oil platforms. Lots of juicy danger for us to get our risk assessing teeth into. “Bridge Conception” is a tour de force of every time of bridge you could think of, each week given by an expert. Heaven!
The core desgin options – steel and concrete – were not nearly as baffling in French as I had expected. It did however help that we had covered some of this material before at Imperial. The twist here is that we are learning EuroCode instead of fuddy duddy old British Standards, whatever they are. Finally, the one that I feared was going to be the most mathematical, entitled Parasismic Studies, has recently had its maths content reduced after some complaints. Now if this all sounds like a walk in the park then let us not forget that all of the above is in French, as will be my exams. So, all things considered, a little déja vu is no bad thing.
Glen Canyon Dam, as featured in the popular film «Superman»
When designing, building and operating a dam, there are a few steps that ought to be followed in order to avoid large loss of life. Here are a few that I picked up at my first lecture in a series with the title that I have badly translated as “Conception of risky structures”:
1) Pay your workers well. The most dangerous period during the lifetime of a dam spans its construction, the filling of the reservoir and the first year of full service. Going on strike over pay during the construction is dangerous because the dam might not be ready for the winter’s flood waters and subsequently may get washed away.
2) When checking for cracks in the bedrock on to which the dam is to be founded, looking at 50 metre intervals is not good enough. A dam in Wako, Texas collapsed when a section of the bedrock between two cracks about 49 metres apart gave way.
3) If cracks have been found in the ground, it is unwise to leave them unfilled just because your client refused to give you any extra money to pay for this unforseen cost. To do so has led to death and destruction.
4) If you are satisfied with the conclusions of your ground survey that there are no cracks in the ground under your dam, don’t then move your dam a few metres downstream to make your lake a bit bigger without doing a new survey. Doh.
5) If when building, say, a 280m high dam in Italy, you notice that the mountain into which your dam has been founded has started moving(!) at a rate of several centimetres a day, don’t just carry on filling the dam and hope for the best. (In this case though the dam didn’t collapse, the mountain on one side of the lake gave way and a terrific landslide almost filled the lake that had been created, generating an enormous wave which swept over the dam and destroyed villages down-stream)
6) Finally, if your dam once built is not a profitable venture, don’t succumb to the temptation to sell it to a group of anglers. They may use it for stocking fish. This in itself is no problem. The problems arise in the rainy season when they may lose a significant portion of their fish down the overflow pipe. To prevent this loss, they may put a gauze over the pipe to keep the fish in, but which will also unwittingly get blocked with the leaves and branches which usually accompany storm waters, forcing the flood waters over the top, destroying the dam and killing 2000 people in the town below.
These six tips are from real examples of fatal dam failures.
When designing a dam, don’t just be safe, be dam safe.
Rose leaning over the Hoover Dam during our visit in March 2003
Tuesday lunchtime saw the end of the SPEIF (semaine préparatoire pour étudiants ingénieurs en Français – a stunning acronym). With our free afternoon a group of us students had hatched a plan to play football. The day before, one of our number spoke to the manager of the Pont’s sports pitches and said it would be no problem. However, when we turned up on Tuesday we were told that we weren’t able to use the pitches because we were not part of a registered team. I have to say that I wasn’t as surprised as some of my would-be team-mates as I had heard similar tales regarding extra-curricular activities at French universities. The trend seems to be that if it is not sanctioned as a registered team event then the doors or gates will be remain locked. I suspect for example that if I try and set up a band I won’t be able to use the practice rooms unless I can demonstrate my proficiency on the rhythm guitar.
The trouble is that we didn’t want to set up a team, we just wanted to have a kick-around. And even if we had tried to set up a team I wouldn’t have been able to join as I can’t join the sports club, the reason being that I don’t have a vaccine card to prove that I won’t get whooping cough as I step up to the penalty spot and sue the school. In this respect, either I try and dig through the annals of the NHS to find out if I have such a card, or I turn my arm into a pincushion and have all the jabs again at the same time and risk sending my immune system crazy. No, neither of these options were an option, so to speak. I was intent on finding some public space in the Cité Déscarts where we could play. The only large open space that isn’t fenced off is that in front of Les Ponts, a couple of acres that would have been perfect for football had it not been landscaped with long parallel ripples half a metre or so in height that would have made it difficult to play. I might even go so far as to suggesting that it had been landscaped in this way to stop us from playing.
Still, unflapped by another apparent barrier, we used our keen engineering eyes to survey the plot and found that between two of the ridges there was just about enough space if we played partially on the grass and partially on the helipad at one end of the field. With laptop cases for goal posts we were all set.
Apart from Michi who I think has had some pretty top-notch football experience, we were all tired after about ten minutes, (such are the barriers to exercise in France!) but we played for an hour or so. And no one was really keeping score – it was great just to have been able to play.
Freedom of speech for the mute
Today I taught for the first time my other English conversation class. This class is larger than the first; twenty to the previous lot’s eleven. It was hard work to get them talking, and that’s all my boss at in the language department wants me to do! I knew that the students of this second group were broadly from science and computing courses so I opted in the first lesson to teach from an article on Google’s recent entry in to the Chinese Internet market. Before we worked on the article itself we had a good session generating useful vocabulary for all to use. My second preparatory item however, a discussion about freedom of speech, was not so successful. Questions such as “what do you think freedom of speech means” and “do you have the right to say what you want here in France” were all met with stony silence. I had to hide the smile on face. It did seem a little ironic that we were talking in essence about a country where there isn’t the right to freedom of speech, and there I had a bunch of students in a ‘free’ country who could have said anything for all I could have cared but instead exercised their right to say nothing. A case of freedom of speech for the mute. Still, things picked up with a vocabulary quiz at the end where students had to buzz in with animal noises. That old pedagogical chestnut!
Cookie Doog
In August I went for an ice cream with my grandmother at an ice-cream parlour oft frequented by us on trips to the seaside on France’s Atlantic coast. She was giving the order, so I asked her to order me a double cornet with vanilla and cookie-dough ice cream. Not certain what I meant by cookie-dough, I pointed to the little card above the box that gave its name. There was no French translation. She wouldn’t even venture trying to say cookie-dough with a French accent so I made the order myself sticking to the English pronunciation.
The ice cream itself was unmemorable, but the question of how to say cookie-dough in French stuck. Clearly the ice-cream parlour didn’t think there was a translation. I was reminded of this question when I went to see Indégènes at the cinema the other day. There again was cookie-dough ice cream. I had by now reached the conclusion that French for cookie-dough is in fact cookie-dough which then raised another question, how do you say it with a French accent? My grandmother clearly didn’t know and Mary sidestepped the issue by plumping for vanilla (boring).
According to my dictionary, dough is pronounced “d
This post refers to an event I took part in a couple of weeks ago and I have been meaning to write about it for some time. One afternoon Mary and I were walking past Place Gambetta in the 20eme when we were approached by a woman getting people to sign up for a peace protest in the following week. The protest coincided with the interational day of peace, I think. Anyway, what caught my eye was their plan to make an enormous CND sign using people holding flaming torches. I think that this kind of protest can attract a lot more meida attention than smaller activities and so can have more impact. This human CND sign was to be formed infront of the Eiffel Tower, so as to get a good photo shot from above. Mary couldn’t make it but I signed up there and then and bought my wax torch for the protest (the police wouldn’t let the protesters sell the torches at the event itself)
So later that week, I sauntered down to the Champs de Mars with my rather menacing enormous wax-covered batton. When I signed up I was given a number which corresponed to a position in the CND sign at which I would be standing. And sure enough, on the grass beneath the Eiffel tower I found my number written in flour in the glass. Not being a regular protester, I naively assumed that things would kick-off on time. Silly me. But over the next hour, the crowd started to gather. Pic-nicers enjoying a romantic glass of wine beneath the tower became unaware that they were slowly becoming encircled, trapped, overwhelmed by an enormous symbol of peace (I’m only kidding – everyone seemed quite friendly really). All of a sudden it was time to light the touch papers. From the ground it was hard to really make out the form of the symbol. There we stood for an hour while speeches and demands were called out. I only narrowly avoided setting light to the hair of my section commander. It’s amazing actally that no one’s hair did go up in flames. Then it was time to go home, satisfied that the world would surely take notice and get rid of all its nuclear weapons.
From the ground
From above
As far as food at institutions go, the grub at ENPC ain’t half bad. For the early morning caffine boost, elevenses and mid-afternoon pick-moi-ups there is the coffee bar situated in the full splendor of the atrium. Canny students know at precisely what time to grab the left-over croissants before they get put out at the end of the day. That just leaves lunch which is served in the cafeteria. There is a generous selection of hot and cold food not to mention the bulging desserts. Not only does it taste good, it is also subsidised, but instead of knocking ten percent off the cost of any purchases as they do at Imperial, they just knock 1.70 Euro off the bill. This reduction makes a meaty main course half the advertised price. But if you opt for the enormous bowl of salad from the salad bar costing only 1.50, when it comes to the check out my discounted meal has a negative price. That is, everytime I eat there, I earn money! All I need to do is eat 75,000 more lunches there and I will have paid off my entire student debt! Yum…
It’s one of those things about growing up. People start calling you Mister. For a long time it was just my bank or anyone asking me for money. It wasn’t until I started teaching maths in the states that I had to get used to the sound of Mr.Broadbent on a regular basis. You see, the trouble is it’s just not me, it’s my Dad, or even his father.
Since I have been at Imperial, things have been pretty quiet on the mister-stakes. Today however, I became Monsieur Broadbent when I stepped for the first time into the English conversation class that I have now started teaching at the University of Marne-la-Vallee. There are few things that I hate. Nuclear bombs and radishes. Apart from those the only other thing I really dislike is the sound of ‘Broadbent’ said in a French accent. There is no way you can twist Broadbent to make it sit comfortably on a French palette, and I have tried. So no sooner had I become Monsieur Broadbent did I quickly rebrand myself as ‘Oliver’. Original, I know but it just seems to sit well with me. My parents like it. If it wasn’t for all the trouble it would cause with French bureaurocracy, I would just ditch the Broadbent bit all together for the year. Just like Brittany did.
So with an oven installed in our ever-better equipped kitchen, I decided to invite a few of my new international chums over for dinner. We discovered that our modest dining room table normally used for sitting two to four people, can actually accomodate eight. I cooked up a tomato soup (1.5 kilos of tomatos for a euro!) and some pesto to go with. The guests came with offerings of cheese and a fine selection of wines (all ticked off of course on our gastronomic maps). Christna and Alex’s tortialla espagnol was the best I have ever had – suspiciously good in fact. It turns out that for a piece of coursework that had had to do on quality control processes, they investigated the factors that affect how good a tortilla tastes. (Fingers crossed that the secrets will be divulged).
With the meal over, another four people showed up taking the total up to twelve – a record for the moment – before we headed off to the local venue the Flesh D’Or to see a few bands. As we piled out of the club in the early hours, I was glad to only have a ten minute journey home. Some of the others living out near the campus had to wait until five in the morning to get the first train home.
Time is flying by. I am already into my second week of college. These first three weeks are preparatory classes for all the Erasamus students at les Ponts, afterwhich the term starts in earnest. I am being taught in a group of ten made up of two German students, one from Austria, one from Grand Canaria, two Portugese and then the three of us Brits from Imperial. So used to the Imperial timetable (teach 50 mins cappacinno for 10 teach 50 etc) am I that I found the two hour long classes a little hard going to start with. The trick really is to not look at the clock!
Not that the lessons are boring. No, the course is being taught well and as far as language classes go I think it is the most I have ever been engaged in this sort of lesson with a good mix of group work and class disscussion. The aim of the course is to help us to settle in and to bring our French out of retirement. Part of the settling-in is achieved by teaching us about “French culture”. The material is almost priceless in the way it conforms to a sterotype of what kids are spoon fed in French schools (France’s rivers, mountains and departments, as well as gastronomical maps and economic croissants – the term given to the younger and more productive cresecent from Brittany to the northern Alps). We’ve had gastronomical maps – my request for a map of cheeses is currently being processed. More alarmingly, the worksheet that gave the history of names that you are likely to hear in France failed to note that between 15 and 20% of France’s population are from families of immigrants one, two or three generations ago and so do not have names derived from Asterix or celtic invaders. There was also no mention of the foods that these groups might traditionally eat on the gastronomical map. No surprise there. But on the plus side, I have to say that I am sucker for learning things like maps of cheeses so give me a few weeks and you can test me.
Right, got to run for my first test…
Sunday evening I started to pack my bag for my first day of school on Monday, or so I thought… A double-check of a letter from ENPC reconfirmed what Mary has suspected: that I wasn’t actually starting until Tuesday. Brilliant, a free day in Paris, and with my new travel card I could do absolutely anything! I could have started on the Louvre, go for a walk across town, walk across Henry’s bridge, even start a neighbourhood photo diary – obviously being inspired by Sunday’s exhibition. The important thing about being able to do anything is that you must finally settle on something.
I settled on making tomato soup for lunch with Andy and Liz who were staying with us at the time. To this activity I had alotted an hour, but anyone who knows me in the kitchen won’t be suprised to hear that it was ready only just in time for lunch. It was worth the wait though, even if I do say so myself.
In the afternoon, Liz an Andy invited me to tour our world-famous local cemetary Pere Lachaise. Amongst its ‘old members’ lie Jim Morrison, Oscar Wilde, Edith Piaf and a whole host of nineteenth centrury notables including Proust, Hausmann (I will surely write more in the future about this legend of town planning) Berlioz and Chopin (I have heard of these latter two that they are now de-composing!). But I am never entirely sure what I am supposed to when I approach one of these heady headstones/town planner tombstones/composer’s coffins/celebrity sarcophogi. I don’t feel sad for someone who has been dead all my life, and whose great works are not contained this cemetary. It also seems bizarre to be happy snapping tombstones when there are freshly laid flowers all around for the much less famous recently deceased. Still, I am as guilty as anyone: here’s a photo of Liz and Chopin’s grave
So, with still half the day still to kill, we popped back to the apartment only to get the key stuck in the front door. It wouldn’t budge in, out, round or any combination of these. We were locked out and there was no one on the other side to help us out. We waited an hour and a half for a lock smith that never showed up, then found another who said he’d be round in fifteen minutes. Liz, Andy and I were shacked up in a bar next door to the locksmith’s store so I was waiting to follow him up the road to our apartment, thinking he would walk. Only suddenly he put on a helmet and disappeared off towards our flat on a scooter. I chased after him to no avail, but thwarted him at the one way system.
He couldn’t budge the dammed key and so he brought all his skills to bear on his crowbar with which he forced open the door. Though the door and frame were hardly damaged the whole lock had to be replaced. A nice one hundred and eighty Euro surprise.
By the time it was all cleared up, it was gone 5pm. Somehow, though I had had a packed day, it was not exactly how I imagined my free to day in Paris to have been filled!
On Sunday I had the chance to go to a “repas du quartier” – (neighbourhood meal). The deal is that it’s a meal somewhere in the locality, sometimes on tables in the streets, where everyone brings some food and shares it with whoever likes the look of it. Sunday’s repas took place in the local cultural centre, called “Confluences.” There our lentil salad and tzatziki were swapped for various pasta salads, some sizable hunks of cheese and some delicious brownies.
My description makes it sound a little like a battering stall – “I’ll give you a bit of French tart for some of your melons” but it is far from that. You stroll from table to table taking a pick at whatever you fancy. We got chatting to a woman with the most adorable little girl who kept getting chocolate moose on her nose. The mother had brought with her an entire roasted chicken wrapped in foil. It was just like having Sunday lunch with the neighbours.
The cultural centre used this opportunity to promote their programme for the year which included a season of plays, films, something else that a very passionate man spoke about at some length but which I failed to catch a word of, and photography exhibits. At the moment the centre is displaying a set of photos taken by a group of African photographers who were invited last year to come to the Twentieth and photograph the area.
One of the sets of photos was taken by a lady who set about approaching twenty different households and cooking them a meal. In each case a photo was taken, some at the table, some in the kitchen, all very warm photos, and almost all featuring the brightly coloured casserole dish that she brought the food in. Later, when clearing up our plates, we spotted that same casserole dish on a table. The photographer had long gone, her visa having expired soon after the final photo was taken, but the dish that she had used as her prop remains along with her pictures.
This photo display was one stop on a trail of photo exhibits around the 20eme arrondissement called “Nouvelles Africanaines”. We took a map and checked out some of the others. The image below shows a wall of photos donated by residents of a local hotel where the majority of the rooms were filled with families who lived there permanently.
I am really glad to have found out what’s on at Confluence and I am really looking forward to going back there soon to see a play next week.
I saw this ad last spring but it still makes me laugh!
Hooray – I have arrived. Last night, I hauled up the steps the final suitcase into the flat that will be Mary and mine for at least the next year. And unlike my last few visits to Paris, I won’t be getting on a Eurostar back to London at stupid o’clock tomorrow morning, nor the day after (not in fact until the end of October, and that will be an evening train). It feels great to be able to settle in.
First thing this morning I went out to the university campus because I have been given the opportunity, through a friend of Mary, to teach some conversational English classes. The ideal thing about this part-time work is that it would take place in the building next door to where I will be studying. To get out to the campus, it is a five minute ride on the metro down to Nation and then twenty minutes on the RER out to Noisy-Champs on the outskirts of Paris.
The RER is Paris’ answer to London’s CrossRail – or should that be the other way round since the Parisians designed and built theirs over twenty years ago. The RER station at Nation is an impressive feat of geotechnical engineering. Deep below ground-level, the RER’s platforms are in an enormous tunnel, 30m in diameter and several hundred meters long. The station has some amusing pseudo-technical features that someone who has just missed their train might happen to notice. For example, it looks like the train drivers look at computer monitors to see when people have finished boarding the train, but on closer inspection these devices are in fact a mirrors mounted in the shells of a computer screens. Hmmmm. That along with hi-tec looking train indicator board that actually has all the possible destinations permanently displayed, with a light bulb that lights up next to the destination for the next train, and the ultra-modern-ultra-dated vacuum formed plastic benches along the walls, lead me to conclude that the designers could see the future, they just didn’t yet have the technology to implement it. But enough about stations…
The univeristy campus is called the Cite Descartes. It houses numerous ‘Grandes Ecoles’ as well as the university of Marne La Vallee. The Cite is an architectural playground and I am looking forward to taking a closer look at some of the buildings. After some wondering, I found the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chausses. It is an attractive steel and glass building with an impressive and inviting attrium in the middle. It is in stark contrast to some of the buildings of the University of Marne la Vallee and a reminder of the extra funding that the Grandes Ecoles enjoy over France’s regular universities.
The interview went well, and depending on my timetable at ENPC I will be teaching a few hours of conversational English a week. Some of the teaching will be for science and maths students and there will be also be classes for students studying urbanism. I think it is all going to be quite interesting and I look forward to starting. It will be a good intro to the world of work in France.
This afternoon we went to an exhibiton called “Residencity”, a history of the housing that has been built around the edge of Paris. The exhibition itself was in Montreuil, a suburb in the east of the city, in a beautiful building about twenty minutes from the end of the metro. We were in the heart of the banlieu, a catch all term for anything outside the Periferique ringroad and synonymous with the riots of last year, or so the news would have you believe. This bit didn’t look all that different from the urban landscape you would find around Harrow. I get the impression that there are many who would think of this as a no go area. Seemed quite nice to me!
“Residencity” charts the housing projects that were built to provide accomodation for Paris’ worker population, which swelled at the end of the nineteenth century. Early schemes to clear slums envisaged replacing them with low level blocks of houses among trees remincisent of Ebenezer Howard’s garden cities. These early sketches look surprisingly modern but their age is betrayed by the clothes that the people in them are wearing. Designs for buildings in the 20s are not all the dissimilar to the building that we live in. By the 50s, the developments had taken on the enormous sprawling dimensions typical of some of Paris’ grimmest housing projects. It was all to clear from the posters and protest slogans displayed opposite these designs that slum-dwellers had little choice as to where in these monster developments they were to be housed.
One cartoon particularly made me laugh. It showed the aspirations for housing of three different classes. For the working class, heaven was a detached house with a garden, purgatory the new edge of town developments, and hell, the slums. For the middle class, heaven was a modern apartment block, purgatory a detached house with a garden, and hell, the new edge of town developments. And finally for the upper classes, heaven was a chateau, purgatory was a modern apartment block and hell was a detached house with a garden. Well, it made me smile (Note to self: they do say that a picture says a thousand words – a photo might have been good here)
Some archtiects of these developments were more creative than others. Blue sky thinking is evident in the conception of this quite unbelievable housing development – Les Tour Nuages: (click to see image in full)
26th August 2006 I am on my way down to the south of France for the bank holiday weekend. This is the first time that I have managed to get down to Agen for a long weekend without flying. The difference is being able to stay the night in Paris on the way down. Having stayed the night somewhat fleetingly at the apartment – leaving before I arrived sort of thing – I had the chance to enact Phase 2 of the Move to Paris (the first being the random collection of posters, blankets and books last March described in a previous entry). In the end, I didn’t have the strength of character to take only my computer, underwear and a sharp pencil. Yes, in addition I packed a more predictable assortment of clothes and engineering notes. These were packed into my now-famous US Army surplus army bag. A bag of such enormous dimensions that if for some awful reason Mary and I get turfed out of our apartment, we could easily invert the thing and turn it into a three bedroom teepee on the Place de la Republique. While this bag presents tremendous advantages in terms of the sheer volume of stuff it can take, it is also impossible to lift when full. Presumably the US Army uses Hercules aircraft to move theirs. In March I had to rely on my own Herculean strength to carry that thing up the four flights of steps – sans ascenceur – to the flat, and compacted my spine in the process. This time I was more cautious and only half filled it. I had to leave out my pencil sharpener, which means my sharp pencil won’t stay sharp for long… And now I am zooming south on the train. They’re a sophisitcated bunch on the TGV (train de Grand Valise – train of big suitcase as I like to call it). Apart from the half of the occupants of the carriage who were asleep, the rest fell into one of three catagories: those who were reading a white folio french novel, those engaged in that French game – i’ve only seen it in France – where they have to fill in a completely empty grid with words, and the rest who were almost certainly students because they were copying out almost word for word notes from lectures, carefully underlining words in lots of different colours. No one was heard talking too loudly on their mobiles, and no one was drinking Stella. Bliss.
As I left Paris, I could see the tower who’s engineer is the namesake of this blog, somewhere in the mist. Later on, as the train approaches Bordeaux St-Jean station it slows to a crawl in order to cross the enormous truss bridge across the swollen brown waters of the Gironde. It was only recently that I discovered that this bridge was where Gustav Eiffel first made his name as an engineer in charge of this building site. Arriving at Bordeaux St-Jean, I was presented an exciting array of alternative destinations: the Basin de Arcachon for some Atlantic waves, Nice for the Med and Irun which is only one vowel away from one of my dream train destinations… Only last night I heard the story of two similarly train-minded friends who were enroute to Istanbul by rail. Initially flumuxed at not being able to find their train at the station in Budpapest, they found their single Turkey-bound sleeper carriage hooked up to a train to Bucharest. Their tickets matched the carriage number and so with a certain degree of trepidation they boarded the carriage which was empty apart from a conductor with whom they shared no common language. The next day, their carriage wsa unhooked from the rest of the train and left standing alone – tracks stretching out in either direction in the searing midday heat, Istanbul somewhere in the distance. They waited several hours with no information as to where they were, or when they were going to be leaving. It struck me as quite romantic. Now you don’t get that on a plane.
My thanks go to Henry Bardsley, lead structural engineer on the Pont Simone de Beauvoir, for putting me right on some of the points I made in my article on this bridge earlier on in the week. Since it is not the purpose of this blog to disinform, I will bring these corrections to the fore.
For starters, while the central vesica of the bridge was indeed built on the banks of the Rhine, it was constructed on the west bank and not in Germany but in France. Secondly, the Seine is not tidal in Paris and as such there was no need to wait for low tide in order to fit the barges carrying this central section of the bridge under the low arches of the Pont des Invalides. That is not to say that passing under the arches didn’t present the engineers with any problems. Indeed, Henry writes that ballast was used to not only to balance the barges but also to change their height in the water so that they could carry their cargo high over the seas and low under Paris’s other bridges. The Pont des Invalides was successfully passed but not without a grazing the river bed!
Once again, my thanks to Henry for setting the picture straight!
This quote is from Jonathan Glancey in today’s G2:
“It is nearly always a lovely day in Architecture World. Happy, shiny, gym-fit young people living today’s latte-fuelled urban 24-hour lifestyle, stride through sparkling, quango-approved “regeneration” utopias. In these illustrations it never rains. The wind never blows. Snow is an alien concept.” Lamenting the fact that so many architectural renderings of future developments look blandly sunny, he rightly points out that many drawings are done with the same standard bits of software so every scheme looks much of a muchness.
Structural engineers on the other hand could do with a little more sunny weather. While the architects are worrying about what the building will look like in the sunshine, engineers are more bothered about whether it will stand up in the wind. Those who are (un)lucky enough not to know about these things may like to know that a significant portion of a building’s structure is there to stop it falling over in the wind. And once the wind is catered for, the weight of a dusting of snow on the roof – by no means insignificant – has to be accomodated. And of course there is rain water to look out for, collecting under joints in steel and causing rust in hidden places, getting into cracks in the concrete and coroding the rebar or just making stuff rot. When all this is said, I quite like the sound of Architecture World.
On the subject of gym-fit people walking through these shiny utopias, I am often interested by the care that goes into choosing the people that architects put into their drawings. The people in a landscape drawing I was working from for a gallery were wearing the most skin-tight jeans (These architects were obviously certain that this project would be finished before next year by which time drain pipes will habe bewly returned to fashion’s gutter). I can imagine the meetings where architects sit around a table and work out how the people in their drawings can best represent the desing ethos of the company. I imagine Richard Rogers (Pompidou centre and Lloyds of London) proposing that the people they use have all their veins and digestive systems on the outside! On a more serious note, I do know of a project where the architects were asked by the client to remove two people from their drawings because they looked too homosexual. Doesn’t sound all that utopian to me.
Thanks to all of you (well one of you) for your requests for photos. I have now been trying to get photos to work on my last entry but to no avail. I will attempt tomorrow at work. A new banner is on its way as well. You lucky things. Until then I am afraid you are just going to have to make do with all my little words.
This weekend is my last in London. I am away next weekend for the bank holiday, and the weekend after that it’s the big off. It has all come round much faster than I expected. Obviously, the biggest thing I need to sort out is packing. Sitting here in my bedroom – no, stuffroom would be a better name for it as there is only one bed in here but lots of stuff – I keep merrily imagining that it all might pack itself, Mary Poppins in the nursery style. It’s not, is it? Right. Well then, what to take?
Earlier this year I had had the opportunity to take some stufff out to Paris four months ahead of my move. Given that I was still going to be living and studying in London for four more months I tried to pack things that I definitely needed for my year abroad but didn’t need in the short run. What went was a motley assortment of blankets, posters, thick jumpers and books that are halfway down my reading list for the year. When I went over in the summer I came very close to taking my skis with me, for one it would mean less stuff to take out in September. It would also have appealed to my sense of humour to be travelling with a pair of skis during the July heat wave.
A very major concern is what to do with all my notes. The thought of going through them all in the middle of the summer holidays does not make me somersault with joy. In fact, the later I leave it, the closer I am to reaching the conclusion that all I need is my computer, a sharp pencil and clean underwear.
The other part of leaving is saying the goodbyes. Unlike my friend Chloe who is going to be in the Middle East for a year, I am only going to be across the water. There are places on the Metropolitain Line that are further from central London than Paris. And given the number of times that I have been to and fro this year already it really doesn’t feel that far. I don’t raelly need to say goodbye do I? But I know it doesn’t work like that. So yesterday the two of us had a leaving party. It was a really good afternoon and evening in a pub, but the ironic thing is that I am planning to see everyone that I saw yesterday again before I leave, thus adding to, not diminishing, the irreality of the fact that very soon I am leaving. Also, if I am going to see everyone again, how am I going to find the time to pack?
I say again, all need is a computer, clean underwear and a sharp pencil…
It is with great pride that I report that Expedition Engineering won Thursday’s cricket match against Wilkinson Eire architects. In a game between two teams each with a fair spread of novices and more skilled players, the tension was maintained right until the last ball of the final over. Expedition won by two runs.
I have to confess that despite my great improvement at the nets, my bowling was a little dismal. When I batted I was in with Chris Wise, and we finished the batting with the pair of us not out. Although I didn’t quite score any runs by hitting the ball, there was a no ball called when I was at the wicket – maybe my ugly mug put the bowler off and made him send the ball wide, giving us the two points that we wouldn’t have won without, I am sure!
Though my placement with Expedition is short (too short with ever clearer hindsight – funny how with age your eye sight diminishes but your hindsight becomes sharper), there is a chance that there will be another match before I leave for France. Next time i hope to actually score a run. That would be a real improvement!
It is great to be playing sport. I forfitted that day’s gym session because I knew I would be getting some excercise at the game. Though quite what the net benefit was, considering the beers and chips on the company tab afterwards, I am not so certain.
My thanks go to Mary for finding this article in the Sunday Independent on Paris’ newest bridge, Le Pont Simone de Beauvoir: http://www.sundayindependent.co.za/index.php?fArticleId=3340477
I am fond of this bridge – not a word I would ever use for a person but entirely appropriate for a graceful structure such as this. Last February I lead a group of 80 students on a three day tour of Paris’ engineering sites. This is no news to most readers of this blog as I suspect that most of you were on the trip. For the benefit of those that weren’t, the weekend was packed with an ambitious itinerary of Paris’ engineering and architectural attractions. For me, the highlight was this bridge.
Reading this article, I am sad, although not unsurprised, to see that the structural engineers on this project – Paris based RFR (www.rfr.fr) – are not once mentioned. I struggle to think of a construction project where architects have been involved and not engineers. Even the models at the end of year show at the Architect’s Association (www.aaschool.ac.uk) this year had to be checked over by a structural engineer to make sure they were safe.
When it comes to bridge design, I believe there is an important part to be played by architects but that the design should be lead by the engineering. When it comes to buildings, the engineering – the stuff what makes it stand up and not fall over when the wind blows – can be hidden away, like in the Ritz (London’s first steel-framed building) or on display for all to see like at the Pompidou centre. With bridges however, there is no hiding the engineering. The structural design is the language of the bridge from which all other things follow. It’s very hard to hide it.
I am sure that your comments will help me clarify my stance on this matter so I shall leave it there for the moment. There is more to say however on this bridge. Firstly, its structure should really referred to as a lenticular truss. Thinking of it as an arch bridge supported by a suspension bridge is helpful. Anyone who had just read that article might think that the bridge’s width was purely architectural. It should be noted however that such a long-spanned bridge is susceptable to fluttering in the wind. The bridge’s width helps to stabilise it from these wind induced oscillations.
Secondly, the bridge was not technically built in Paris, but rather on the banks of the Rhine in Germany. The enormous central span of the bridge was constructed at a German steel fabricator, and then loaded onto two enormous barges, floated up the Rhine, along the North Sea Coast down to Le Havre, under the Pont du Normandie (my favourite bridge http://www.carte-postale.com/honfleur/pontdenormandie.htm) and up the Seine to Paris where low tide had to be waited for to get the enormous section under Paris’ low arch bridges. The whole journey can be seen on the website of the guy who lead the strucutal desgin on the project, Henry Bardsley (http://www.henry-bardsley.com/).
Though it has been open for a few months now, I have yet to make a crossing. I am sure that when I do, readers of this blog will be the first to know.