Category: Engineering and architecturePage 2 of 2
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…
It’s not just about the trains. It’s about the track, the gentle curves, the tunnels, the soaring bridges… click this link to fly the route of the TGV…
Choose life, choose reducing your carbon footprint, choose highspeed train travel instead of flying Thank you SNCF, for making trainspotting cool, at least for a day. Yesterday, a…
As part of the preparations for the eagerly anticipated TGV Est-Européen, which will operate from June 10th between Paris and Strasbourg, the SNCF are hoping to break their…
[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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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 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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
I am forever bored of engineer vs architect debates. They are just not cricket. That is unless they are about cricket. Tomorrow I will make my cricketing debut with…