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  • 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 Familia in Barcelona. I say building site because the colossal cathedral is not due to be finished for another twenty to forty years.

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    It is well known for its UNESCO protected facades, but it is the columns that flank the impossibly tall and narrow nave, sculpted like impossibly slender trees that are astonishing. All imagined and engineered without finite element analysis or any other modern day computer wizardry. The grounds for Gaudi’s beatification are his pious lifestyle and his divine inspiration (attempts at finding a “miracle” to confirm his saintliness – a prerequisite on the saint application form – have resulted in some pretty hilarious and far-fetched tales. See the article for more). I have no doubt that Gaudi lead a pious life and there is no doubt that having a new saint on the block will help with the construction of this cathedral: every drop of concrete has been paid for by private donations and gate fees so a few extra pilgrims would do no harm. It would be a shame however to confuse mastery of the mechanics of materials for divine inspiration. A wander around the crypt at the at the Sagrada Familia demonstrates some of Gaudi’s technical mastery through his models (details of which deserve a post of their own).

    The same could be said of other ‘devinely inspired’ engineers and architects: Christopher Wren for St Paul’s, Michelangelo for St Peter’s, Imohotep and his step pyramid (Egypt’s first). They may have prayed a lot but they are also all great engineers!

    Finally, I wonder about the wisdom of granting sainthood to an architect/engineer. The bible is not exactly full of praises for worldly construction afterall…

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    Engraving The Confusion of Tongues by Gustave Doré

  • 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 is the amount of time I have spent following the build up to yesterday’s first round presidential election, but then that would not be entirely true.  With the media hype, maybe you would think it was impossible not to be aware of the daily twists and turns of the presidential polemic. In fact, over the last couple of weeks, this has not been the case for me partly, I think, for the following reasons.

     

    Firstly, the equal coverage of each candidate, enforced on the media by law, had a strangely distorting effect.  For example, in the mornings when I was most likely to listen to the radio, I had all the information I needed about where the most minor of candidates had taken their soap boxes, but add this up over twelve candidates and it made for a lot of noise and not a lot of perspective.  Also, in order for it to be equal, it was difficult to comment about one candidate’s policies without having to list the other twelve’s.  I think that this equal coverage has many merits.  It gives the smaller candidates a platform, and without which I am sure the success of Olivier Bescanenot (almost 1.8 million votes in the first round), an exciting voice for the future, would be diminished.

     

    The second phenomenon is that at work no one talks about the elections, or if they do, they only talk about who they are not going to vote for.  Interestingly, more than one developer has pointed out the terrible consequences for the construction of large-scale projects if Sarko doesn’t get in.  A little short-sighted perhaps if they actually want find anyone to build their projects…  Outside work, it is a similar story.  North-eastern Paris is not exactly a stronghold of the right.  In the bars where I hang out there is little chance of finding a Sarko supporter.  That said, until the eve of the first round, I was yet to encounter anyone who was really behind Ségolène (interestingly, Ségolène gets corrected to semolina on my computer).  There was still fear of a repeat of 2002 when the left was divided, leaving a rightwing and an ultra rightwing candidate to choose from in the second round.  And so, despite their dislike, or in some cases loathing of her, she was quite likely to get their vote, and no wanted to talk about it because the choice was rather depressing.

     

    Last night, in a vegetarian thai restaurant (with a tantalizing menu that deserves more attention from me) a friend rushed in who had just returned from the polling station where she had been helping with the count.  More than 50% of the 11th Arrondissement had voted Sego.  Apart from the three guys I met at party on the eve of the election – the first Sego ‘militants’ I had encountered in a social context – I am sure that plenty of those votes were cast with gritted teeth.

     

    And so onto the second round… Which way will centrist bronze medallist Bayrou’s 18% share of the vote go?  Will enough transfer to the Sego camp for her to pull through?  One thing is for sure: any shame at voting Sego – the tactical vote to some – has past with the first round.  I am sure that those in the quartier that gritted their teeth in the first round can unclench their jaws in the second.  There is no-longer a choice to make, and in anycase they won’t be voting for Ségolène, they will be not voting for Sarko…

  • 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 number disposed of their digestive load on my head (unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on which way you look at it, I wasn’t wearing my hat).  I hope they all get bird flu.

  • 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.  Then, one by one, they all tried, albeit unsuccesfully, to fly off with their dead friend in their clutches.  This seen went on for about five minutes, until birdfood again seemed more interesting than mourning.  I wish I had started filming earlier

    [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMiwfNfgy8s]

  • Flying the TGV from Paris to Strasbourg

    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 Est Européen from Paris to Strabourg in 5 minutes, stopping at all the major bridges along the way, naturally…

  • Trainspotting: TGV at 578 kmph

    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 especially modified train with bigger wheels and go-faster stripes set a new train speed record of 578 kmph. The only thing that is faster on rails is the Maglev train, which doesn’t  even touch the rails, and at that, only goes a few kilometres per hour faster.

    It is fair to ask whether this record attempt was worth the 30 million Euro price tag. Travelling along France’s more minor train routes, there the decay and tattiness to be seen that is indicative of the large sums of money that have been diverted into the TGV programme. That said, France’s highspeed network is a great asset: where there are highspeed lines, flying simply takes longer. The development of the highspeed network has also pumped large sums of money into structures research, especially in the domain of bridge design. This record is in part another stage of that research process. The data recorded from sensors on the trains, tracks and bridges will help improve the understanding of these components under the intense vibrations that a train travelling at these sorts of speed can generate.

    There is no doubt however that a significant reason for spending so much money on this attempt is the hard sell. France wants to export highspeed technology to South Korea and even to the United States. It is just possible that a train that travels at over 300mph is enough to make even the US, where internal flights rule the day,  sit up and take notice.

    Check out this trainspottingtastic coverage from France2:

    [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8skXT5NQzCg]

  • TGV in 354mph record attempt – 1pm

    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 previous high-speed train record. As might be expected, in France this is a media event. I heard it mentioned twice on the breakfast time news and it will be broadcast live on the lunchtime news. Read more here…

    Also, I spotted this on the arrivals board last night at the Gard de Lyon. Anyone waiting for a friend on the 19h06 train might be waiting a long time…

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

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    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 refurbished. The art deco styling of the fixtures and fittings is evident throughout, even including the overhead lighting gantries.

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    The programme, conducted by Valery Gergiev, included Debussy’s La Mer and Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune as well Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring: the charismatic Gergiev bringing new energy to these repetoire pieces. From the front row, it is difficult to hear the full sound of the orchestra, but instead you get the expression on the faces of the violinists as well as the sound and sweat of Gergiev conducting. This is what I mean when I say I went to see the LSO play. The Stravinsky was earth-shattering, played with unstoppable momentum right until the penultimate note which Gergiev left hanging what felt like an age before the final bang.

  • Ugly Duckling / Le Vilain Petit Canard

    Ugly Duckling

  • Wobbling la Passerelle Simone de Beauvoir

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    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 to conduct ongoing tests on the bridge’s dampers. The tests were being conducted by the CSTB (France’s centre for building science, where I almost ended up doing my projet de fin d’études).

    Bridges such as this one, and infamously, London’s Millenium Bridge, are susceptible to wobbling caused by the excitation of one of the bridge’s natural frequencies by the pedestrians who use it. As well as forcing the bridge deck up and down with their footsteps, pedestrians also exert a sideways force as they alternatively plant their left and right feet on the deck. This sideways movement is of a similar frequency to the transverse vibrational mode of lightweight bridges such as this one and the Millenium Bridge. When a bridge does start to shake noticeably, there is a tendency to ‘lock-in’ whereby pedestrians synchronise their steps with the vibration in order to stabilise themselves, but in doing so, give more energy to the vibration. The first time that this lock-in phenomenon was observed was at the opening of the Millenium Bridge.

    This sort of vibration is unlikely to cause any damage to the bridge itself but it does make the people onboard feel quite uncomfortable. It is therefore an issue of serviceability. In order to reduce its effects, such bridges are installed with tuned dampers designed specifically to damp out these effects. And in order to check if these dampers are working or not, it takes a group of fifty or so enthusiasts (usually engineers) to jump up and down to see just how much they can get the thing to wobble. I tell you, we got some funny looks from passers by…

  • 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 know what it is in English.

    In French the term is ‘Paroi Berlinoise’. I always see it translated as ‘Berlin Wall’. In my (admittedly limited) experience as an engineer, I have never heard of a ‘Berlin Wall’ unless it is a type of reinforced concrete structure with graffiti on one side that typically has a design life of, say, forty years.

    I don’t think this is what this document is talking about. Can anyone help? (It maybe useful to know that ‘paroi’ is a word tpyically associated with perimeter foundation walls; for example, a ‘paroi moulée’ translates as diaphragm wall)

  • 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 was spent shuttling back and forth between our offices and La Défense for meetings about the building’s structure. For me it was a great chance to get to know the project team before the video conferencing kicks off in ernest (despite Margaret Atwood’s invention that allows her to do book signings wherever she wants in the world from the comfort of her own home, it is still not possible to shake hands over the internet). For the moment there are still a number of questions to answer about the building’s facade but once those are answered there will be a rush to design the floor which, for the moment, is where my project is going to be focused. I therefore have the sense that we are in the calm before the storm.

    During a coffee break, I tried to strike up a non-engineering/architecture conversation with the architects. Struggling fora topic, I suddenly remembered that my favourite US online radio station, KCRW, is broadcast from the same town as their headquarters. They listen to my favourite show in their office on the otherside of the world, every morning. Doesn’t the internet make the world small?

    In other news, old calculations that I had made on the cost of another tower have come back to haunt me. It is not that they were wrong, it is just that I was suddenly required to present my results without any notice. I was therefore glad that I had left a decent paper trail so that I could quickly see how I came to the result two weeks ago. This is basically thanks to my new strategy: to date absolutely everything, to put the date in the name and print it in the header and to include a table of modifications for each time I use a calculation sheet. This may all seem obvious now but it wasn’t when I started off. I have since been asked to carry out a cost calculation on the tower that is the focus of my project. Since cost will be an important part of the choice of floor design, I will be able to tie the overall cost calculation into my project. And now that I have the method sorted, it hopefully shouldn’t take too long to calculate. The only trouble is… none of the floors are identical…

    + one for those who moan about London Underground – spare a thought for those who ride the L in Chicago – from a new blog find: Anonymous 1%

  • 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 me this link from Jon’s blog. I will add this to the reasons to move back to London list, a list that I hope will soften the blow of leaving Paris in the autumn.

    Project update
    This is just the briefest of project updates. Things have been super busy recently in the office. Most of last week was spent researching how different types of floor structure vibrate when people walk across them. Unfortunately, the classical mechanical methods that we have been taught are not very useful for the design of office buildings as the calculations quickly become unwieldy and unreliable. Instead, the literature in this area gives empirically derived formulas for checking for excessive vibrations. The problem with these quite specific methods is that it is difficult to see how applicable they are across the board to other types of flooring. In the next few days I will be talking to the manufacturers of various different flooring systems to find out which is best suited to the building that I am working on. They will provide their own methods for checking for vibrations, but it would be nice if I didn’t have to rely on them to provide the method with which I will be testing their theory!

    I have also been a little more involved with preparing material for meetings with the architects for whom, being American, it is useful to prepare stuff in English. All of a sudden, from languishing on the sidelines, I have been thrust into the middle of it all. That’s fine with me!

  • 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

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    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 best one yet. With this edition, current editor Andrew Kosinski’s last one of the year, it is clear that it is really starting to achieve the things that I always hoped it would.

    Inspired by the student newspapers that I had seen in the States, I stood in 2004 for the CivSoc post of Livic editor. At the time, the paper was but a biannual sheet of A3 paper stuck on the department wall, nothing more. (The name Livic comes from Civil spelled backwards – a previous incarnation had apparently been called ‘Concrete’ – catchy huh?) My hope was to turn Livic into a regular student newspaper much like those that I had seen abroad. Kosinski has been onboard since the beginning, realising on paper what had previously only been an idea.

    I had several goals in mind when starting out. The first was to encourage student writing. It had struck me that there were precious few creative outlets at Imperial and so I hoped to add at least one to that impovrished list. The second was to encourage staff contributions, and in doing so, improve communication within the department. I had the impression at the time that there was little awareness of the research that went on in the department, and I thought that Livic could help. Finally, a slick looking paper with a broad readership, it was hoped, would attract advertising from industry which might at the very least have paid for printing, and more ambitiously, go a little way towards boosting CivSoc’s budget.

    In that first year, we made some progress towards reaching those goals. For starters, some forty students contributed articles on a wide range of subjects. What was difficult was trying to get reporters to write articles that went into any depth. I seem to remember there being some staff writing, but calls for articles often went unheard, or weren’t followed up. We did manage to break a couple of important departmental news stories (the Creative Resign article being one memorable example), but these were by no means exclusives.

    By comparison, the Livic of today has come a long way. The articles are much more in depth and they cover a wide range of topics. An important story about the future of the course is on the front page and inside there are staff contributions as well a revealing interview with a lecturer. All in all it is cracking read! It is also interesting to see how the layout has changed with time. It keeps getting slicker. I am certain the Arup were more than happy to place an advert I such a classy publication.

    When I was editor, sure I had ideas, but I didn’t have the first clue about how to realise them on paper. Luckily there was Kosinski who did. Both the subsequent editors, Alex Morris last year and Kosinski this year, have not only had the ideas but have also had the skills necessary to assemble the paper on the screen. And I think it is these two skills combined with a desire to say something and knowing how to say it, that are now pre-requisites of a Livic editor, a role which three years ago was somewhat of a joke position on the committee.

    And so what of the future? As of next year, the first three editors will all have left the department. There is always the fear that one day Livic will fizzle out for lack of enthusiasm, and it does take enthusiasm to get something like this out of the door. But with fourteen issues in the bag, Livic has now got momentum. Elections have just been held for the post of next year’s editor. I wish him or her luck and I look forward to seeing Livic’s continuing evolution.

    Access Livic online here.

  • 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 is to check whether the natural frequency of the floor is in the same frequency range as that for footsteps. If the two frequencies do coincide the latter could resonate with the first causing the floor to shake.

    Today I have been looking at an American document that brings together the different ways of estimation this interaction. Most of the results are based on empirical evidence of what seems to work. This lack of rigour is fine with me, and is common in engineering. The thing which has really held me up is the units: all the calculations are in pounds, feet and inches! Could there be a more unhelpful system of measurement?

    Curious about this archaic standard, I started hunting around on Wikipdedia and found a wealth of information on the origins of both systems. Apparently, the only countries still to use imperial units of measurement are the USA, Liberia and Myanmar, although, I might add that here in the office my colleagues were surprised to here that in the UK we also use the metric system.

    I urge anyone who is similarly disposed towards the imperial system, to use this site to help them out.

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

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    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 et du patrimoine, France’s national architecture museum. Neither of us had thought to check if this was and invite only event and indeed, it was. Luckily, a few charming smiles and a couple invitations made themselves available from the large group loitering outside the front door and then we were in.

    The Cité is housed in one of the wings of the Palais de Chaillot, that splendidly curving art deco building opposite the Eiffel Tower on the other side of the Seine. Unlike any other architecture exhibit that I have visited, this one had not one model of a building. Instead, the main exhibition space, itself a long and wide curving corridor, was filled with fifty odd floor-to-ceiling screens onto which a series of short films were being projected. Every film was about a project, but every film had been shot differently: some showed in speeded-up time a building going up, others showed people flowing in and out, the building through the different seasons. There were images taken from satellites that showed whole areas being redeveloped. My favourite was a series of photos taken from a balcony, of an American city skyline. The photos start in the 60s and go on, lets say one a month until the present. As the images tick pass, the downtown skyscrapers grow like mushrooms after a rainstorm. One by one the pop up out of a hole in the ground, until eventually, one pops up right in front of the balcony and the view is completely obscured.

    It is not just buildings that are showcased. One video was taken from a car driving across the Milau Viaduct. Another, from a helicopter flying over an offshore wind farm.

    I think that the exhibition rather successfully shows the dynamic side to buildings. How they change, during their lifecycle, fro, construction, to use, to decay, to demolition and also how people interact with them. None of these aspects are static and so the moving image is an ideal medium for communicating them. My one criticism of the exhibit is that in the dark room where the videos are projected, it is difficult to read the programme that tells you what the projects are. Maybe you are just supposed to know already. I wonder?

    The free lemony champagne was worth the effort it was to get through crowds of people in order to see the exhibit. It is hardly surprising that on the opening night I saw a lot of architects and not a lot of architecture. I shall therefore definitely be making another visit before too long.

  • 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 at my lack of progress. I just seemed to be doing calculations while newer ‘stagiaires’ were wading deep into reading material for their projects. So this morning, with a little more determination I brought the subject up with the powers that be, and this time it was with success.

    It now looks like the bulk of my project will be a study of the floor design for an innovative new tower. As well as dynamics calculations, it will involve plenty of discussion with the architect and the other engineers involved, which suits me. I am happy because, though complicated, it is a well defined subject. I too now have piles of documents to wade knee-deep into.

    Despite this sudden change of course, I do not regard the work that I have done so far to have been a waste. If anything it has been a good intorduction to working in the company. The time spent thinking about how best to decompose the problems I have solved will not have been wasted as, and I said this in a recent blog post, that my method should be applicable to a wider range of problems and, if not, at the very least, next time in my career when I have to work out the cost of a building.

  • Metro Entrance Gare St.Lazare

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    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 and have a look at the striking curved-glass metro entrance that was built as for Paris’ newest metro line, the driverless 14.

    The architects and the engineers on the project were Arte Charpentier and RFR respectively.

    The glass has a double curvature: that is to say, like a dome or the saddle for a horse, the glass curves in two different directions. The lateral stability of the structure is assured by the fine metal cross-bracing that can be spanning diagonally across the frames. The frames are in stainless steel, a material that, thanks to its many different crystal faces, reflects light from many different aspects.

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    Unfortunately I didn’t have the time to have a closer look at how the various elements are joined, which is always the devil in projects such as this where transparency is the goal.

    You can see a slideshow of photos of the Gare St.Lazare station entrance from my engineering photo site by clicking here.

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  • Zen and the art of building maintenance

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    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 the reader to find beauty in technology, in maths and in reason. I am no book reviewer, so I will only add that Persig uses the motorcycle as an analogy for different ways of thinking. In particular, he talks about the idea of an ‘intellectual knife’: the tool with which we slice up a problem into its components before we set about resolving it. So each evening on the metro, I have been reading about different ways a motorcycle can be divided up in order to explain its different functions, and it has struck me how similar this exercise is to what I am doing at work in order to calculate the cost of the cost of a skyscraper.

    One way to add up the cost is to start at the top left-hand corner, and work your way down to the bottom right-hand corner, counting up all the lumps of concrete and steel along the way. This method would be ideal for a bungalow but not for a high-rise as for starters it fails to take into the repetition in the structure. So the first use of the knife is to cut the building up into repeating chunks. Now in the case of this building, like the Gherkin, this building is curvy, so no two floors are identical. The knife is therefore used to cut the building up into chunks whose dimensions are broadly similar, so that mean values for these chunks can be used.

    Am I boring you yet? Then look at the photo. I put it in to spruce up what on the surface might otherwise be an apparently boring entry. It’s the view from my office (prizes for anyone who can spot the Eiffel tower). Refreshed? Right, lets carry on…

    So we have our broadly similar chunks of building: can’t we start counting? Well yes, but if you want to automate the process you have to put into Excel. I do want to automate it because this project is constantly changing and I want to quickly be able to modify the calculation. This is really where the headaches begin. So often have I marched into writing an Excel spreadsheet only to find that when I am waste-deep in it, it becomes very complicated, difficult to verify and impossible for anyone else to follow. This happened to me last week on this same project. I spent the weekend thinking that there must be a better way. Before I started again I set out the main things I wanted to achieve when doing the calculation again. It has to be easy to enter the data, easy to modify the data, easy to verify the results and easy for somebody else to follow.

    If there are any readers left, I want to illustrate the problems that these objectives can cause. I won’t go into how I solved them because whereas the objectives are general and can be applied to the automation of other engineering problems, the solution is specific, of less ‘interest’ to others, and I have that recorded in the form of the spreadsheet itself.

    Starting with entering the data, it is very well to count up all the similar columns but how can you be certain that they have all been counted. One answer is to create a big grid with all the stories, to cut and paste in all the similar elements and then to count them all up. Whilst this approach starts off very pleasing to look at, (I think this approach uses Excel well) it quickly becomes unwieldy. In order to simplify things, it is necessary to only put in the absolute minimum of information, putting the rest of the information perhaps on another sheet. The risk here is that the sheet quickly becomes difficult for someone else to follow. The other problem with hiding information elsewhere is that it also becomes difficult to modify quickly.

    One might conclude that ease of modification is at the cost of simplicity. However with careful application of the intellectual knife, I don’t necessarily think that this is so. Experience of this sort of calculation, something that I don’t have much of, would give an idea of which variables are more likely to vary and so which ones should be easier to change. For example it may be that the thickness of the core walls are much less likely to change than the thickness of the floor.

    Moving on from the depths of dullness and back towards a level of interest that might only correspond to vaguely dull, the one thing I haven’t talked about is how to check you got the right answer, because after all, that’s all that matters. Verifying my procedure and checking that it gives me a reasonable answer has taken me so long (most of the week in fact) that I wonder if using a computer has saved me any time (remember citizens that that is what computers are for…). Trying to unravel what a string of cell names in a formula actually means is the bane of my nascent working life! It doesn’t help that I have no sense of what the answer should be.

    That all changed yesterday when I spent the afternoon looking at the final cost add-up of another building designed by this company. By looking at what the price of the foundations was as a percentage of the total cost, say, I instantly had a ball park figure to head for. I then used this rubric to look for where my answers were way off par. Sure enough, where there were discrepancies, there were mistakes.

    It makes me wonder why bother doing any of this calculation afresh. The two match up so well that surely one could take the price of the first, modify for inflation, add a bit, and be done.

    To conclude, after a week of work on this calculation, I am happy with the result. I have gone into some detail about what I have done because for one thing, a great deal of reflection would quickly have been forgotten as soon as I move onto the next thing. I fear the hours that can be spent in front of computer screen with nothing to show for it. I hope that at the very least I will be able to apply what I have learnt here to the next problem, and more ambitiously that the fruits of my labour will be a rethink of the way that these problems are tackled, which strikes me, albeit as a novice, as inefficient.

    It seems entirely appropriate that ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’ has inspired me to think in depth about what I am doing. It is unfortunate for me however that motorcycles sound a lot more sexy than volumes of concrete and Excel spreadsheets. Thanks for reading.

  • “The late worm avoids the bird” and other stories…

    I have my cousin Ralph (of Stringfever fame – see link to the left, under music) to thank for that piece of advice, which makes me laugh each time I think of it. Were I a worm, I would quite likely have been eaten by birds of prey at the market this morning. I was there before eight so that I could get some shopping in before breakfast (this is the sort of behaviour that my Marston Street house mates might associate with me when I was sitting finals). It was such a beautiful morning and, well, I like the market. It’s better however, when all the sellers are actually at their stalls rather than in the café. The bio-lady (who has not been treated with any chemical fertilizers) had evidently nipped off for one, and the lady who sells bags of chicory and apples ideal for juicing, opposite, probably went with her. In that spot, the only person left was a man selling bras, who sheepishly refused to take any money on behalf of his neighbour for a bag of her produce.

    And now from before breakfast time, to lunchtime, which is an event here at work. At noon, people start milling around the office talking about going down to the canteen (a quick survey of the people in my team confirms rather unscientifically what I have been told, that people here for breakfast have a coffee and a dried biscuity thing at most, so they must be starving by noon). A big group made up of anyone from the director to the draghtsmen (though interestingly not the secretaries) go down in the lift to the underbelly of the building that is the canteen. This vast underground space has a buffet down one side then rows upon rows of tables and benches. The food is very good if you are into meat, and while not cheap, it is still subsidised by the company. And then everyone eats together. Slowly. Several courses are taken, even if one might only consist of an apple or yoghurt. Only when everyone on the table has had their final spoon of Yoplait does anyone get up. The trays go off on the conveyor belt where they get taken to invisible people who magically clear them and make them nice for the next engineer. En masse, we leave one windowless room for another, this time with a coffee counter at one end. Espressos are gulped down at breathtaking speed. Quick as a flash we are back up in the elevators and at our desks without ever having the inconvenience of seeing sunlight or talking to anyone who doesn’t have a diploma from Les Ponts (insert other grand ecole name here if you like). That’s efficiency for you.

    Speaking of efficiency, two separate personnel departments are now in a race to see who can get me a social security number first. I still have not been paid for my teaching work at the University of Marne la Vallée. I am sure I mentioned this at the time, but just to recap, the university wouldn’t give me a contract without a social security number, and the social security wouldn’t give me a number without a contract. Someone had to give in, and rightly so it was the university. That was back in November. Now in March and my new job, I need a social security number so that I can get paid at work. Here, they gave me a contract straightaway and are now applying for the number. Given that the university are still faffing around, it looks likely that my new job will get me the number and that I will then give that number to my old employees who should then be able to pay me. That’s inefficiency for you. And before anyone thinks I am having a go at French bureaucracy, I am not. It’s just the university being rubbish.

  • 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 in concrete and steel design that I took during my first term at ENPC. However, while these courses were based on the new Eurocode regulations (currently being adopted in the U.K. and in France), the company I am working for is in a transition period during which it is using the new code for some projects and the old French code for others.

    During the first few days I therefore had to get my head round these older regulations that I had never seen before. In particular I was getting hung up on the issue of how much a beam should bend in service. While a bending beam may not necessarily break, it may cause temporary walls to crack and finishes to become damaged: hence the limits on how far a beam can deflect in everyday use. Both codes have similar limits for this deflection; the only difference is in how you calculate the deflection. The Eurocode is a lot more flexible (read vague) on how to perform this sort calculation than the French code. I spent a long time going into the detail of how to apply the French code and got quite confused. Everyone that I asked had their own way of doing it but no one seemed to have a definitive answer (this was not helped by the fact that those who do know are rushed off their feet). In the end, I found that these technicalities accounted for minor differences and I was able to move on. I remain unsatisfied however with my methodology.

    Once a methodology is established, calculations can be automated with Excel. Everyone has their own Excel sheets to speed things up. Or at least that is the idea. When the sheet is up and running, it is very easy to rattle off calculations, but getting it to work is the difficult part and I sometimes wonder whether the time taken verifying the code doesn’t add up to more than it would have taken to do the calculations by hand. It is also very difficult to follow your working in Excel, and even harder to follow someone else’s. The biggest challenge is making these automated calculations readable to others.

    As well as the program for dimensioning beams, I am now on the second version of a program that will work out an approximate cost for this tower. Something that started relatively simply has spiralled out of control, hence the second version. I hope to be able to report progress tomorrow!

  • 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 work for Ponts.  With all that finished (and after a refreshing weekend of skiing in the Alps), I am now able to give my project my full attention.

    I have decided to use this blog to help me chart my progress through the next four months (actually it is now just three and a half!).  With my project as ill-defined as it is, I hope that entries in my blog will help me keep track of what I am achieving as well as recording the decisions that I will make along the way.

    I say that the project is ill-defined but I only have one point of reference, that being the project that was the fourth year of my chemistry degree.  Back then, I was given a specific research topic and I spent the first weeks reading around the subject and planning experiments for the future.  Though that was for a chemistry degree, I think it is not an unreasonable comparison as it seems to be a similar point of departure as that for people I know doing their final year project at Imperial.

    With no real point of reference, it is difficult to know what to do.  This much I do know from my supervisors at work who themselves undertook similar projects when they were at les Ponts: in the first few weeks, I will be involved in the projects that the team that I part of are working on.  The company has several tall tower projects on the go.  One possibility is that my project will be a broad survey of the different aspects of tall building design, taken from my experience of working on these different projects.  Another is that I will investigate a specific aspect of the design of one or several of these buildings and that this investigation will form the basis of my project.  It is therefore difficult to know, for example, whether the cost estimation of a skyscraper that I carried out this afternoon will be a component of my report or not.

    Hence it is all the more important for me to write up what I am doing along the way.  Watch this space…

  • 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 degree – a far cry from my chemistry finals five years ago.  Assessment at ENPC is continuous with marked courseworks and the occasional test.  The “Conceptions Parasismiques” exam last week was only significant because it was my last engagement at the Ecole des Ponts, for tomorrow, I start my placement in a French company.

    At this point it would be helpful to mention how I would be finishing my degree if I were back in the UK.  In their final year, students at Imperial are expected to take on a full course-load of lectures and tutorials and at the same time, to conduct independent research that is to be written up at the end of the year, somehow in the middle of revising for final exams.  In contrast, the system at Les Ponts, which I might add is a system which seems to be typical among other European engineering courses that I have heard about, requires that its students undertake a “projet de fin d’études”.  Rather than being conducted in parallel with studies at the university, the PFE takes place in a company or a laboratory.  In either case, the student is offered a placement during which they can undertake research at the same time as being involved with the day-to-day work of that enterprise.  The placement is also paid, albeit at minimum wage level.  Final year students are close to being qualified and so should know their stuff.  This system offers them the chance to experience the work environment and also offers cheap labour to the companies involved.

    Getting a placement is something of a magic art, and the following words are intended for the eight or so Imperial students coming to ENPC next year.  What is not entirely clear with the PFE is whether it is the students who should be approaching companies with ideas for a project or whether students should be contacting the companies and asking them what they have on offer.  One thing is for certain: if you tell an engineering company in France that you are from the Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées and you are looking for a PFE, they know what you are talking about.

    In order to get my first experience of the professional world, and of speaking French proper like, I went to an event back in November called the Forum Trium, a careers fair where engineering companies and financial firms battle it out to solicit the interest of students from one of a number of grandes écoles in Paris.  I turned up with the worst CV in the world, officially, and proceeded to distribute copies of it evenly across the hall.  Most employers were looking for people interested graduate jobs, but my name was noted nonetheless.

    I left the event no closer to finding a project.  Term plodded on and the PFE slipped down my list of priorities until just before Christmas, when I found that a fair chunk of my French friends had found placements, and what’s more, they were going to be working on topics that not only interested me, but were with companies I would have dearly liked to have had a place with.  I was no closer, however, to understanding how this application process should work.  By the time term started in the New Year, I had landed on the idea of investigating the ways in which the carbon footprint of a building can be measured (more about this in the future).  The project would have taken place at the local building research institute near Les Ponts.  The whole project was conceived over a series of coffees with a couple of members of staff from the department.  I was all set to accept when I received a phone call from a director of Setec TPI who invited me to an interview.  It seemed that one of my awful CVs from the Forum Trium had made it onto his desk.  He was looking for an English speaking engineering to join a team working in collaboration with an American architect on a new skyscraper at La Défense.  Unshaven, I turned up that afternoon for the interview and was offered the place.  In the space of a week I had gone from having nothing to having a choice of placements.

    In the end I chose Setec.  My project there will be an investigation into the role of skyscraper floor design in the overall stability of the building, both during construction and in service.  But I didn’t choose this placement for the topic; rather I chose it for the experience of working in a French engineering office environment, and the opportunity to work on one of Paris’ most prestigious projects.  If the last four months of study have been good for my French, I am hoping that this placement is going to do wonders.

    In conclusion then, what would I recommend to next year’s students when it comes to looking for a placement?  Well, I would definitely advise going to the Forum Trium and introducing yourself to as many companies as you can.  Since I accepted my offer at Setec I have been offered two more placements (including one with SNCF that would have given me free TGV travel for the rest of the year!!) and both of these directly from the Forum.  My other piece of advice is not to be scared to approach companies yourself and say, what project could you offer me.  They expect to get calls from people like you, so you may as well get in where you want to before everyone else does.  The chances are that the early you get involved, the more likely you are to get to choose a project that really interests you.

  • Womb with a view

    womb-with-a-view.jpg

    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 border. As part of the project, the RATP commissioned a series of art installations on or in the vicinity of the route. So it was with travel card in hand that I went, albeit a little too late, one Saturday afternoon, to see what I could see, so to speak.

    The trip became somewhat of an art-hunt for all I had to help me was a cutting from a newspaper giving some approximate locations, and a metro map. Unfortunately, I was not able to experience the murmuring benches as the park they were in had shut. And I simply couldn’t find the installation called “Mirage” (even though Mary swears blind that she did). One of the best installations, in my opinion, was realised using just light. Where the tramway passes under the TGV lines coming out of Montparnasse, the bridge’s beams and columns are lit up in orange and blue at night time reclaiming an otherwise threatening space (and showing off the beautiful metalwork on the columns which must have been lost in darkness even during the day).

    The tour finished with a sculpture on the middle of the bridge. This installation is by Sophie Calle and Frank Gehry (with RFR as engineers) and consists of a twisted metal alcove or shelter with a telephone inside. According to a sign inside, only Sophie Calle has the number and she occasionally calls the number and to talk with whoever maybe passing by. The sculpture is a a shelter from the wind, a womb high up over the river, isolated, yet connected. If you have a few hours to spare in the south of Paris, I recommend taking the time to take the tram.

  • The Metropolisians

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    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 the ultimate prize is a gig at the Elysée de Montmartre (Paris’ Astoria for the Londonners amongst you) and a record deal. With their brit-pop charm, stomping rhythms and oodles of charisma, they brought the house down with their second round performance last Friday night.

    Appropriately for this second stage the competition was harder to beat, but not in terms of quality but rather the number of people clapping. Bands are rated on the basis of how many raised hands a man at the front can count at the end of each set. There were some pretty ropey high school bands and it looked at one point that one of these bands might have won, having brought half the high school with them for support. But in the end, it was the Metropolisians who got the last laugh with 189 votes to 99 for the band in second place.

    Check out their website and if you hear “winkle-pickers” in one of the lyrics, it’s thanks to your friendly engineering correspondant in Paris.

  • 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 included nine words, some more obscure than others, that had to be included somewhere in the text. So for those who want to read a little story about a local bric-a-brac store look no further than below (the aforementioned nine words are in bold)

    Le vide grenier de l’onzième

    Il s’agit d’un magasin parisien qui existe depuis quarante ans dans ce quartier assez bobo. Sa vitrine est encadrée de bois très travaillé, avec des fleurs et des gargouilles gravées sur les deux côtés : un véritable bijou d’architecture. Derrière on trouve tout un bric-à-brac bizarre en provenance de quelques centaines de greniers anonymes, vidés grâce à cette entreprise.

    La famille Tatattic habite à cet endroit depuis la fin du XIXe siècle : l’arrière grand-père Tatattic fut bachi bouzouk pendant la guerre de Crimée. Il traversa ensuite l’Europe pendant vingt ans avec sa carriole en tant que marchand de produits turcs. Il accumula un stock précieux, et quand il arriva à Paris, il vendit la totalité pour acheter un terrain de deux cents mètres carrés à côté de la Rue de Charonne. À cette époque, on était en pleine campagne, bien avant que la ville de Paris soit agrandie.

    Pendant les années soixante et le réaménagement de la ville, l’arrière petit-fils Patrick Tatattic vendit le terrain et fit construire un grand immeuble avec un magasin au rez-de-chaussée. Il trouva l’amour avec une jolie danseuse qui s’appelait Kati. Elle fit le clown et le fit rire. Ils se découvrirent en plus une passion commune, les vide-greniers. Après trois semaines, ils se marièrent et commencèrent à explorer les greniers du quartier…

    Quarante ans plus tard, ils travaillent toujours ensemble. Derrière le comptoir, c’est Patrick Tatattic, toujours chic avec son complet marron, qui vous accueille. C’est lui qui s’occupe de l’argent et du prix final. Pourtant, il ne connaît l’emplacement d’aucun de ses produits. Pour trouver quelque chose de précis, il faut s’adresser à sa femme.

    Kati Tatattic n’est plus aussi belle que dans les années soixante, peut-être à cause de ces quarante ans passés cachée dans leur entrepôt (elle applique plusieurs couches de maquillage et sa peau fait un peu abricot fané). Elle est devenue vieille, comme les trésors que cette femme, sans enfants, surveille sept jours sur sept : c’est passionnant. Bien qu’elle ait quitté la scène depuis son mariage, elle danse toujours avec son mari. Si on regarde par la fenêtre quand il n’y a pas de clients à l’intérieur (c’est souvent le cas) on peut voir les deux en train de valser dans les couloirs.

    C’est vrai que le stock est d’une qualité extraordinaire. On demande comment ces marchands peuvent sélectionner les meilleures pièces de chaque grenier au milieu de friperies, de valises et de la poussière qui n’intéressent personne. Leur secret: on dit dans le coin que Madame et Monsieur Tatattic ont un passe-partout pour tous les greniers de Paris, et qu’ils viennent en pleine nuit pour voler les objets de valeur avant que les propriétaires, qui dorment en dessous, puissent les vendre à un prix supérieur. Attention, peut-être sont-ils déjà venus danser chez vous.

  • 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 and plant more wind turbine seeds so that they too can have fields full of wind turbines and we can stop this place that we live in getting any hotter!

  • 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 and roads. I had my last lecture today in a course called construction métallique. It has been one of the hardest courses I have taken here but has also been one of the most enjoyable. As well as covering all the theory of how metal structures ‘work’ we have also looked at a range of specific examples, including the Stade de France, the pyramid at the Louvre and the Milau Viaduct. Today’s final class was given by an expert on metallic bridge construction and he had the following to say about America’s brutal motorway bridge design.

    In France they keep it simple: put two metal beams across and then fill the gap between the two beams with a concrete deck. I say simple because it is very easy to work out how strong each beam needs to be, and that, after all, is what we engineers are paid for, right? In the USA however, things are not quite so straight forward. Famously low budgets for construction have lead to the use of lower quality materials and so there is a greater chance these bridge beams could fail. Each state has it’s own set of rules (which must make for nightmares when trying to build an interstate highway) but in all states, they are so worried about the strength of their beams that instead of allowing just two, they require five.

    When I was living in the States, I noticed how brutal the motorway architecture could be. And now I think I know why. It is very difficult to make five enormous steel beams under a bridge look elegant. There is also no architectural budget, so all you get is the bare minimum. This five beam system also makes it very difficult for the engineer to work out what is going on. For reasons that I won’t go into here, when you have five beams under a bridge, it is complicated to calculate which is supporting the car and which is sitting there looking ugly. The ultimate irony is that if they spent a little more on materials, they would of higher quality and so they could use much less.

    bridge-anecdote.jpg

    A ‘brutal’ New Jersey bridge across an esturary close to New York

  • Film uploaded to my new website

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    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 back at the start of my semester at ENPC. I had been asked to give a presentation as part of a language class on any topic that of relevance to engineering. Weary of Power Point, I decided instead to make a short film that I then presented to the class. Those who have studied under the French system will spot the strategic use of ‘articulateurs’. I would only like to add that I hope my French has improved somewhat since those heady first weeks of term.

    The other clip I made using some panoramic photos that I took at the top of the ‘Gherkin’ in 2004. I found a programme that would string them all together. I then used imovie to make the photo pan and uploaded that mpeg to the web. This process was a bit laborious. Can anyone advise me if it would have been quicker to create a photocast instead?