Happy New Year

Well, here we are in 2010 – and I can already promise exciting things for the Paper Project this year. The education side continues to be a great sucess. We have a number of volunteer run events at schools for the year ahead, all of which give young people a taste of why civil engineering is so rewarding.

As well as continuing to take the project to schools and young people, the ‘art’ side continues to flourish.

This summer, we’ll be bringing the exhibition ‘Sustainable Habitation’ to Birmingham, and we’ve already managed to secure some fantastic exhibition space in the centre of the city.  We’re working with some great artists, architects and engineers to built a thought provoking collection of new installations from the talented people of this fair city. There’s an image from our proposal document below – very much an artists impression but I hope it’s an exciting taster of things to come!

 

A step up the supply chain

The Paper Project has been on holiday over christmas, but, never one to stand idle, it’s gone a step up the newspaper supply chain. Why build with newspaper, when you can built with trees – fallen winter branches in this case, oh, and cotton string.

Of course, it will all biodegrade over the next few years, but then transience has always been part of the artists toolkit.

Happy New Year!

 

What use the structural engineer?

Someone asked me:

“What is the contribution that good structural engineering can make to reducing our carbon footprint?”

The answer (which surprised me once I’d written it) went:

It seems that structural engineering can only contribute a statistically small amount to the climate change debate.

By the time structural engineers are involved in a project the key ‘climate change’ decision – what to build and whether to build it at all – will have been made by other people. The main way for structural engineers to contribute is to drive for minimum material through efficient design but this is only available because efficient design happens to be cheaper. The client wants ‘minimum cost’ first, ‘minimum material = helping climate change’ is a happy coincidence.

As soon as material efficiency is no longer a client’s desire, structural engineers must forget it too. Witness the structurally unoptimised (but very quick to construct) concrete high-rises in the middle east – at the flick of a client’s pen, ‘fast to build but inefficient’ takes precendent over slow and sustainable. Structural engineers’ service are bought by, and hence respond to, the client’s wishes, and sustainability is likely to be bottom of their list.

We can (and probably should) try to shave 10% off a building’s materials by efficient engineering, but it’s possible that if an individual structural engineer really wants to help mitigate climate change they should consider a move to a new field – renewable energy, new materials research, politics, climate science or possibly just join a low-energy commune and live a life of quiet minimal-consumption!

We’re hooked on a long line, and it’s rare that the fish can persuade anyone to stop fishing…

P.S. I’d love to be convinced that the above is wrong – anyone care to restore some optimism to this blog?

 

Art and the Environment

Over the next few weeks, the art:21 blog will be discussing Art and the Environment as their next Flash Points topic. The kick-off post is here.

 

A weekend in Wales: part two.

I had an E-mail this morning with more images from the second day of the Bridging Views of Llangynidr weekend (below).

On the second day, the local community continued to build structures and began to hang them with images of local scenes as well as memories and recollections of the area. There were a lot more young people involved on the Sunday, including a group of girls who must have set some kind of speed record with an enthusiastic construction of the smaller arch in about ten minutes. Supervising the cosntruction was like steering an out-of-control HGVdownhill - only limited control available to direct a huge amount of momentum! Spotting potential problems in the frenzy of activity and trying to correct them with a well timed suggestion was both hugely entertaining and incredibly difficult – a day of managing structural scheme design at work seems simple by comparisson…

 

New ambitions

It feels like I’m getting a handle on what newspaper as a material can and can’t do. With that in mind I’m planning to try something I’m pretty sure it will struggle with. High forces do bad things to newspaper joints, but there must be a way around this problem – and it might lie in reducing the self-weight of the structure.

By optimising members thickness and strength, I’m sure I can build a sculpture  that will support it’s own weight – but look like it shouldn’t. A few sketch models are below – like most of the Paper Project designs it’ll almost certainly get build in cocktail sticks first…

 

Bridging Views of Llangynidr

About three months ago, artist Pip Woolf saw the Building Design write up of the Paper Project and asked if it could form part of a piece of work called ‘Bridging Views of Llangynidr’, in which local people were asked to contribute views of Llangynidr through art, prose and images. These were fixed to a paper arch built by people from the village over the weekend, with the act of constructing the structure giving rise to conversations and discussions throughout the day.

I met some entertainig, interesting and generally wonderful people and thoroughly enjoyed contributing to what was a really exciting weekend. It was great to teach people about the details of the construction process, only to have them pass on those skills to someone else a few minutes later.

A few people seemed inspired to run a similar project in their schools or with other groups, and I’d encourage those people to get in touch if they have any further questions (see the contact tab above) – and to E-mail any photos from events!

 

Torsion for beginners

Trial and error are always required in any undertaking. With thankfully limited quantities of the latter, another concept has taken physical form in the Digbeth warehouse that’s currently acting as something of a studio. Structurally, it’s not too different to previous trussed arches but geometrically it’s a step change in complexity, all one hundered and forty struts used were individually cut to length to make up the whole.

 

A picture is worth 1000 lines of code.

Each hours work is important in heading towards a goal, but some feel more vital than others. Yesterday’s hour produced interesting images (posted below), today involved staring at lines of code…less visually exciting!

The images yesterday were developed in Rhino, using the Rhinoscript plug-in to parametrically define the geometry. Today was spent on more scripting to automate the collection of strut length data to allow easy fabrication. I would upload a screen-shot of the spreadsheet of strut lengths but…well…it’s not very interesting. You’ll have to trust me that things are progressing!

 

Art and artists

Due to the vagaries of wordpress’s image upload function, these are a little later than I intended to post them, but they offer a first look at an installation I’m working on for an exhibition in Birmingham.

 

Sinutruss

Sinutruss installation

It’s becoming apparent that the paper project is getting interest from further afield than I expected. An artist based near the Brecon Beacons has been in touch after reading the Building Design magazine article , with an interest in using the project as a community-based arts event.

Something we noticed during the project prototyping was that rolling hundreds of newspaper rolls gives those participating plenty of time to talk to each other, making it a very social event. The net effect is that manual process of construction leads to conversation and the artist, Pip Woolf, was interested in this aspect of the project. It’s great to see the project sending out shoots – hopefully the first of many.