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!