Design Engineering Refocused

Hanif Kara, Daniel Bosia

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781119164852
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architektur
• Subtopic: Architektur Allgemein

The contents of the book will highlight the differences between the design and engineering disciplines – strengths and flaws. It will also illustrate examples of interdisciplinary interactions. Any false dichotomies will be revealed and the many non-linear processes borne out of challenging conventions between traditional and new modes of practice will be revealed. Projects based on a body of experience spanning many years will be selected to support experimentation that goes beyond an undisciplined search for originality, innovation and creativity. In addition to writings from Hanif Kara and Daniel Bosia contributions will be sought from specialists in the field who have played a role in the operations of P.art® at AKT II – past and present – qualifying them to disseminate and distribute a particular form of 'knowledge'.

• Features work of architectural practices: Adjaye Associates, Foster + Partners, Heatherwick Studio, HOK, Serie Architects, Wilkinson Eyre Architects and Zaha Hadid Architects.
• In addition to AKT II, it will encompass the work of engineers and engineering consultants such as: Arup, Cecil Balmond, Buckminster Fuller, Buro Happold, Pier Luigi Nervi and Peter Rice.

PART 1: INTRODUCTION AND TERRAIN

HANIF KARA

Design engineering has become a cliché of seismic proportions with multifarious and slippery meanings. In order to reassert a coherent promise and to avoid getting caught in its propagation as a buzzword, this book establishes a precise meaning from the personal viewpoint of the editors based on the fundamental triumphs, experiences, methods and concepts developed at AKT II, a leading design-led, structural engineering practice. This is executed by dividing the book into two parts, ‘Introduction and Terrain’ and ‘Heft, Ontology and Horizon’ of design engineering, defined as an esoteric scientific discipline combined with visual stimuli. To make sense of the changes in design engineering and identify patterns, we have curated contributions from past and present colleagues over two decades, enabled by a combination of practice, design research and academic encounters which capture new technologies, analytical tools and processes that have emerged. We are careful not to be conclusive about the subject.

The first part of the book sets the pace by peeking at the recent past, but focusing on the present to paint a picture of a complex blend of high-tech, low-tech, old and new, digital and analogue, with sometimes contradictory outcomes that are the terrain of design engineering today.

1 THE PINK NOISE’ OF DESIGN ENGINEERING

HANIF KARA

The boundary and border of architecture and structural engineering have traditionally been defined by a linear and hierarchical correspondence between the two disciplines. Professionalisation of both disciplines has created a pre-articulated routinisation of the practices and distinct processes where the architect develops insights in design, while the structural engineer is granted exclusivity to react only once the design is developed. Today both are required to develop new skills and competences if they are to survive. In response to cultural and technological developments in the last twenty years, this relationship has evolved significantly, changing economic orders (where rising wealth has increased the importance of aesthetics) and, more recently, presenting new opportunities to question ‘planned obsolescence’ of buildings through the reshaping of design disciplines.

1 AKT II, birth of the structural engineer (c 1800).

Birth of the structural engineer and their position in the wider spectrum of architectural design discipline and history (which transcends our discipline).

The complex, changing relationship between the two disciplines cannot be explained easily, and any historical appraisal of the shifts could start in many places; we must therefore select the starting point of such a narrative carefully. Over the last century, the most compelling spark to questions concerning the dichotomy between ‘architect’ and ‘engineer’ as designers came from Le Corbusier in 1927, when many believe he asserted that the process of engineering should drive the development of architecture:

‘Engineers make architecture, since they use calculations that issue from the laws of nature, and their works make us feel HARMONY. So there is an aesthetic of the engineer, because when doing calculations, it is necessary to qualify certain terms of the equation, and what intervenes is taste. Now when one does calculations, one is in a pure state of mind and, in that state of mind, taste follows reliable paths.’¹

While one cannot agree with all of the implications inherent in Le Corbusier’s prescient statement, it was a strong encapsulation of the prevailing feelings of the time, and we can clearly trace their trajectory and legacy through the Modern and Post-Modern architectural movements, as exemplified by influential figures such as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Louis Kahn, Tadao Ando and Team 4 (Norman Foster, Richard Rogers, Su Brumwell and Wendy Cheesman), who each pushed for greater parity and collaboration between the two disciplines.

In subsequent decades, this cultural realignment was reinforced by profound changes in the field of structural analysis. Despite the crippling effects of the Second World War slowing progress in many areas of construction, a significant turning point occurred with the birth of the first threads of ‘limit state methods’. Driven by the greatly reduced availability of materials post-war, early experimental work in structural engineering conclusively demonstrated that analysis of stresses computed with simple elastic theory was far removed from how structures behaved, and from this emerged the concept of ‘plastic limit states’ that would erode and, in some instances, decompose factors of safety.

2 AKT II, evolution of reinforced-concrete design codes of practice. These codes have evolved since 1930, they assess how factors of safety, combined with new analysis, allow the reuse of old structures.

Though the gulf between the design of steelwork and reinforced-concrete structures remained, limit state methods advanced both materials. Notably in the UK between 1936 and 1948, the engineer John F Baker developed plastic theory for the design of steelwork, indeed it was used for the design of Morrison shelters during the war. While these methods are no longer used for simple structures today, the principles can be used for any buildings.

Meanwhile, in 1955 in the USSR, Professor NS Streleski developed methods of limit state design² that led to the introduction of the first codes in reinforced-concrete design using ultimate limit state method to reduce safety factors in concrete states (Figure 2). And, though not widely used until 1965, this has led to economical structural designs.

Such advances inspired new confidence that can be seen in the work of a long line of engineers since then; people such as Ove Arup, Ted Happold, Felix Samuely, Tony Hunt and Fazlur Khan, Cecil Balmond, Mike Schlaich, Jürg Conzett, Klaus Bollinger, William Baker and Peter Rice, all went on to broaden this incipient trend in the hope of spreading the value of a ‘creative collaboration’. Most significantly, Rice famously urged engineers to ‘imagine’ and temper the use of pragmatism to escape the characterisation of engineers as ‘Iagos’.³

The Present Condition and Redefinition of Design Engineering

Today’s fertile atmosphere provides a novel condition for the specific relationship between architects and structural engineers, as both disciplines try, breathlessly, to keep up with the pace of change. During the early 1990s, newly awakened powers of observation and increased skill in representation encouraged both disciplines to ‘peek’ into each other’s work again in search of perennial reinvention. At the height of this period, the boundary between uniquely human creativity and machines’ capacity for pattern-recognition and complex communication marked a new confidence, offering freer movement between the two disciplines, and between design fabrication and construction. As both platforms and protagonists, leading structural engineering design offices, design schools and educators play a big part in this dance of the disciplines. What was noticeable in the first ‘wave...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• TitlePage
• Acknowledgements
• Future Focus
• Engineering as Exploration
• Part 1: Introduction and Terrain
• Part 2: HEFT, Ontology and Horizon
• Editor Biographies
• Contributor Biographies
• Select Bibliography
• Index
• EULA