Civil Art

Can infrastructure be considered art? Here's a fanciful interpretation of stairs, overpasses, and other civil structures and how they interact with the public aesthetic. The large public sculpture is located outside the Lesseps metro station in Barcelona, Spain.

Expressed Structure

This modern three-story building in Aix-en-Provence perfectly illustrates the architectural concept of expressed structure. The sloping columns and braces provide both the gravity and lateral support for the structure. The structure is cast-in-place concrete. I found it interesting that they chose not to use spandrel beams at the building perimeter. It must have been a challenge to design the intersecting columns, braces and slab such that there was still enough room between rebars to properly cast the concrete.

Masonry Repair?

Note the 2x6 supporting masonry just to the lower left of the window. That can't meet code. I can imagine the conversation with the building inspector: "Well, it's been standing without the board for five centuries. We consider this our belt and suspenders approach to reinforcing." "Um, I don't see either."

Leaning Church of Caen

Talk about settlement issues. The leaning tower in Pisa is not the only structure to baffle geotechnical experts. This church in Caen, France was built on the soft soil of a former river bed. Legend has it that the King who commissioned the church did so reluctantly in order to attain the Pope's permission to divorce his wife. Eglise St. Jean

Batman's Chicago

Several of these buildings were prominently feature in the Dark Knight. Hotel 41, in the lower left, was dressed up as Bruce Wayne's swanky downtown bachelor pad. The IBM building, behind, was the site of most of the municipal shots, including the DA's office, the sheriff's office and the site of the pivital press conference. The final climactic scene in which Batman ambushed a series of terrorists while ferry passengers determined whether to annihalate each other, was filmed in the then unfinished Trump tower (tall center).

My first prescription glasses. Apparently, I've been walking around like the cyclops. The world is pretty cool in 3D.

Two cement trucks fill a pump truck sending concrete to the top of a mid-rise building.

Polo. Not just a sunday sport for the uber riche? My sister, Nancy, is on the Michigan State polo club. Over the Memorial day weekend, she spent about 10 hours working out her benefactor's horses. Her team benefits from the charity of some wealthy alumni. Apparentlty, that kind of generosity is engrained in the sport. Professionals are paid by "patrones" who pay for the right to play with the experts during matches. They usually stick around the back and flag down stray hits, though. Can you imagine the owner of a professional baseball team standing out in deep right field? A new meaning for pay to play.

Solid Void? Oxymoron or the creative brain-child of a structural engineer. An art installation by this name is currently on display at the Graham Foundation in Chicago (see
http://www.grahamfoundation.org/). The piece was envisioned by Cecil Balmond, a structural engineer with ARUP. Balmond is regarded as one of the most creative structural engineers in the world, and this is evidenced by his structures. Perhaps the most famous is the CCTV building being construction in Beijing (see http://www.cctv.com/newSiteProgram/en/project_info.htm). The curators of the Louisiana modern art museum in Denmark found his work so creative that in 2007 they commissioned an entire show exploring the creations of the structural engineer.

Slagsmålsklubben - Sponsored by destiny from Tomas Nilsson on Vimeo.

Hey there Little Red Ridding Hood. This video shows how an engineer might view the famous story. As an added bonus, it looks like it was put together by some Scandinavians.

Love in an elevator, maybe not. It is pretty cool to see the structure in the shaft though. Today's site visit took me inside the elevator shaft of a 1920s building. To upgrade the elevators, some old brackets need to be removed while new steel beams must be added in other locations. The elevator consultants are also concerned about the ability of the pit to withstand the "crash" test required to certify the new elevator.

Since I'll soon be moving to France, I thought it would be good to start learning French. I may not be a francophone yet, but this doesn't look like the right application of the word "oui." You've got to love the creative use of transliteration.

30 West Oak Street a model design for a concrete residential building.  Even though the building was completed several years ago, we keep a roll of drawings in the office to refer to whenever designing a similar building.  One of the most experienced engineers in the office was responsible for the project and produced a masterpiece of simplicity in the drawings.  The complete set for the 20+ story building is only a handful of pages.  It has just the necessary information and no extra stuff to confuse the contractors.  Too often, engineers make things more complicated than they really are.

The Italian Village Restaurant is one of those anomalies in the city, an old 2-story building sandwiched between two high-rises. Local rumor has it that the owner refused to sell to the adjacent developer. In return, the developer sloped the roof on his building so that all of the rainwater would fall onto his resolute neighbor.

Where do you suppose this photo was taken? Anyone guess downtown Detroit? Last weekend I met a friend who's in Med school at Wayne State University. I was shocked to find pockets of such normal looking neighborhoods. What you can't see in this picture, however, is the boarded up building just out of the frame. My friend descibed much of the city as post-apocalyptic. Still there are some good neighborhoods and the rent is really cheap!

This triangular staircase is located in the Arthur Rubloff building on the Campus of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. These are the main stairs down to the lower level where the sculpture workshops and dance dance hall is located. However, it's marked about as well as the broom closet. I've only been in the building a few times, but it has to be one of the most confusing to navigate. The whole experience of being in the building is quite surreal. The art students have clearly made it their home.

Why do the traffic reporters on the radio always refer to the highways by their local vanity names?  And they give the rundown so fast, that it's virtually impossible to understand.  Those listening, and stuck in traffic, have plenty of time to listen to a coherent traffic report.  Maybe if we understood what was being said, we wouldn't be stuck in traffic.  Who says driving is an expression of American freedom, I'll take the train any day.

All aboard!  Chicago is well known for the El.  This is a photo of a Brown line train taken at the State and Lake station.  Since moving to our new office, I've been taking the Red line, which runs below ground through downtown.  I liken it to the dungeon.  I much prefer riding the elevated tracks.  You get such a neat perspective of the city.

For the past three years, I've been teaching courses in structural engineering to prospective architects attending the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.  The students pictured were in our first class and are now about to graduate.  Wearing shirt and tie are two of my colleagues from Thornton Tomasetti who have also been teaching with me from day one.  Today's lesson was about lateral wind resisting systems in supertall buildings.  The students were just realizing how much concrete and steel it takes to make a 100+ story building stand up.

Go Bulls! Go Sox! You'll probably recognize this building from sklyine shots of the city during playoff sports games. The building staff usually puts up large lighted signs to support the local teams in the diagonal roof face. Currently, it's called the Smurfit-Stone Building. It's one of the City's architectural icons, located right at the northwest corner of Millenium Park.

What does a multi-million dollar house in Lincoln Park look like? This is the home of the Pritzker family, one of the richest families in Chicago. The house is constructed of reinforced concrete and features maybe the longest cantilevers of any single family structure. It puts Frank Lloyd Wright's Falling Water to shame. To prevent long-term deflection, like that threatening Falling Water, large steel plates are embed in certain areas of the concrete walls.

Beware of underwater fires! Why does the Chicago Fire Department have a scuba team? I understand search and rescue, but shouldn't that be organized under some other agency? Are they responsible for putting out fires on the mega-yachts in Belmont Harbor? Sounds like one of the better jobs in the city.

Could you operate a jack-hammer and effectively destroy the very structure that you're standing on? Apparently the crew working on the parking garage across the street from my office doesn't have such reservations. To fix the deteriorated slab, they are selectively demolishing the roof deck of the parking garage. To the left of the photo, you can see a roughly 10' x 5' hole around one of the middle columns.!

Mind the gap. My latest project involves figuring out how this special entrance will be structurally detailed. The challenge is to provide support for the curtain wall, tie-backs for window washers to hook into, and support for a fancy 4-story piece of artwork generically called the chimes. Complicating the effort is the fact that a lot of the structure has already been built - thus limiting the design freedom. Oh yeah, and the client needs it all figured out by Friday.

The Big Dig was here! This new pavilion and park land was recently reclaimed from the highway buried under ground. It has opened a corridor between the government center and the North End. If the lines out the doors of the pastry shops in the traditionally Italian neighborhood is any indication, then the reconfiguration of the infrastructure has been a boon to local business.

Harvard Yard is the oldest part of the university, dating back to the founding in 1836. It's a pretty campus even on a cold & breezy spring day.

While walking through the campus, my wife and I debated what has more effect on the quality of education offered by an institution: the quality of faculty or the quality of students. I argue that Harvards ability to attract the very best and brightest has the most to do with its exceptional reputation. Personally, I believe the motivation and intelligence of my peers at the University of Michigan to have contributed more to my education than all those lectures that I half slept through.

Faneuil Hall was originally completed in 1742. During the revolution it served as a public forum for many advocating independence from Great Britian. Over the years, the building was rebuilt and expanded several times. Today it is part of the lively Quincy Market - a fun place to get your clam chowda' fix.

Finally a nice day in Chicago. I met some UM alums in Millenium Park for lunch. North of the park is the Prudential building. It's not the prettiest structure on the Magnificent Mile, but it does have history. It was once the tallest building in the city. Completed in 1955.

Found a great new bar on the South Side, near where I play soccer. Unfortunately, I forgot the name. The decor is quasi retro cool. The light fixtures/wall art over the booths are old pinball machine boards. The bar is neatly lit and features an old CRT screen playing old TV shows in black and white.

Also a great DJ while I was there. Did you know that the Black Crowes' "Hard to Handle" was acutally a cover of Otis Redding, which may itself be a cover.

Lost dog. If anyone has seen Watson, please call. You might recognize him from the generic shadow graphic that looks conspicuously like the Greyhoud Bus Company logo. Seriously, the owners couldn't find an actual photo of their dog. Am I the only one that thinks this is strange?

The Donald was here, at least he was seen at the ground breaking. Today, Trump tower is nearly complete. Topping out at 1,170 feet, the structure is the second tallest in the city and the country. Our news office is directly across the street. If you're ever in the hotel gym, wave to the engineers who can see you jogging on the treadmill.

The tower utilized the highest strength concrete ever used in Chicago. The project was also challenged by being directly adjacent to the Chicago river. The construction team used that to it's advantage, however, as much of the construction materials were transported by barge. The building was designed by Skidmore Owings & Merrill Architects (SOM) and their in-house engineers.

Today is Palm Sunday, the day that Christians celebrate Jesus' final arrival into Jerusalem. It's one of the most crowded masses at most Catholic churches, because the church gives away free palm leaves.

I attend St. Michael's church in Old Town. It's one of the oldest churches in Chicago, rebuilt right after the 1873 fire. The main alter (pictured) was installed in 1903. It was hand-crafted by a company in Wisconsin. Church records indicate that the cost of the alter, plus reinforcing to the floor to support the weight, was only about $12,000.

Welcome to 330 N. Wabash, formerly known as the IBM building. It was designed by legendary architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Mies emigrated to the United States in 1937 fleeing Nazi Germany. His characteristic style was modern and minimalistic, dubbed the International Style. In Chicago, he led the architecture program at the Illinois Institute of Technology and designed several prominent buildings, including the Federal Plaza buildings and 860-880 Lake Shore Drive.

He also designed his own line of furniture for the lobbies of his buildings. 330 N. Wabash currently feature replicas of his originals. However, as I discovered very uncomfortably, the cushions are actually cast in bronze.

Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to design a tower out of some scrap paper, straws, and popsicle ticks that is at least 18" tall, holds a tennis ball, and stands up through hurricane force winds (applied via a 9" fan). At the IDOT construction career fair at McCormick place, over a hundred students took the challenge. Most succeeded. The tallest tower was over 30" high. The exercse illustrated the critical thinking that engineers use to design tall buildings.

Every day my first priority after leaving work is to take my dog, Roxy out for a walk. Since the weather has been nicer (and I mean that in the relative sense), I've been taking Roxy to the nearest dog park. It's not officially a dog park, but between 5:00 and 6:00, the dogs take over. There's an amazing selection of breeds in the neighborhood, from poodles to great danes.

The McCormick Place convention center in Chicago is huge! With 2.6 million square feet of exhibit space, it's the largest convention center in the nation. On Wednesday, I attended a construction industry career fair for Chicago Public School kids. Our small exhibits were dwarfed by the expansive hall. Read more about McCormick Place at http://www.mccormickplace.com

On Tuesdays I play in a soccer league near Chicago's Pilsen neighborhood. The field house is actually a converted manufacturing plant. There's also a very large Hispanic population nearby. The resulting aesthetic is a combination of Aztec murals and loading docks. To top it off, they aways have some Latino Pop blasting through the sound system. It's a unique place to play, to say the least.

The Museum of Science and Industry like to think Big. A wing of the musuem is currently being renovated for a new exhibit about the science of storms. The new exhibits require that a lot of work be done above the ceiling. To facilitate this work, the contractor has errected a work platform- three stories above the ground level floor!

Cranes on barges? Pumping concrete into the river? It's all part of a $22 million project to create a continuous public river walk between the Michigan Avenue bridge and State Street. Typical Chicago attitude: No room along the river? No problem. We'll just build it.

And you tell me that Chicago couldn't handle the Olympics, please. We've reversed the flow of our river, built the tallest buildings in the world, and reclaimed over 1,000 acres of land from Lake Michigan.

All winter we've been able to monitor the progress of the new river walk from my new office on the 15th floor of the old IBM building. Learn more about the river walk here: http://featuresblogs.chicagotribune.com/theskyline/2009/03/the-chicago-river-walk-a-dream-about-to-take-a-big-step-forward.html

The Wabash Street bridge over the Chicago river has been raised to allow crews to work along side the south bank of the river.

Can you see the new light-colored building in the distance, in the center of the photo. I helped design that building. A 25-story condo tower sits on an existing 10-story parking garage. We had to pour a 6-foot deep mat and 16-foot deep girder on top of the parking garage to spread the load out to the larger existing columns. Read more at Structure Magazine: http://www.structuremag.org/article.aspx?articleID=846

Trusses support the cables for the cable cars at the Squaw Valley ski resort near Lake Tahoe, Nevada. These large supports carry 12-person cars up very rough terrain.

Two Chicago landmarks: the Watertower and the Hancock tower. The old watertower and the pumping station across the street were the only buildings left standing after the 1871 Chicago fire.

The Hancock tower was the tallest building in the world upon it's completion. The engineer, Fazlur Kahn of Skidmore Owings Merril (SOM), had to pioneer several new design technologies to make the building possible. The large exterior structural cross braces are part of the architectural charm of the building. Legend has it that Kahn performed rudimentary motion experiments (to simulate how a person on the top floors might respond to the building sway) on a turntable at the Museum of Science and Industry on display to explain the inner workings of a washing machine.

When I returned to my office from a meeting on Wednesday, I discovered a crime scene around the entrance of the building. Rumor spread quickly that someone had jumped from one of the Marina City towers. If you're able to view the photo in high enough resolution, look at the red car. Apparently, the jumper crashed into the parked car, after first clipping a light pole. Rumor also has it that someone was in the car at the time. This is plausible since the street is no parking.

The van behind the car is the city clean-up crew. At the time of the photo, they were unrolling a hose to wash the blood from the street. Creeped out yet? You won't see this working in suburbia.

Say hello to Sue. She's the largest, most complete, T-Rex skeleton in the world. You can check her out at Chicago's Field Museum. Another of my favorite exhibits are the actual pelts of the man-eating Tsavo lions who's story was retold in the 1996 movie "Ghost and the Darkness." The hero in that movie (as in real life) was a civil engineer!

Every Friday evening I play indoor soccer. This competitive pick-up game is great practice for my Tuesday night league. We play in an old fieldhouse in Chicago's west loop area. The roof is supported by wood bow-string trusses that span the entire width of the pitch. As a result of the low ceiling, we're forced into playing with a lot of short passes on the ground.

Everyone gets into the Irish spirit at Chicago's South Side St. Patrick's Day Parade.

Refreshing for the big city, the parade really had a local feel to it. Most of the floats were sponsored by the local trade unions. It was interesting to speculate on which unions had more clout, based on the size of their float, or, in some cases, pimped out tractor trailers. Based on that observation, the Pipe Fitter's union is the place to be. But what exactly is a pipe fitter?

One week later, the parade's organizing committee announced that this 31st showing of the parade would be the last.