chris wise engineer

The arse-about-face design method for railway bridges

June 7, 2011 by chriswiseengineer

When the Infrastructure Planning Commission is replaced in the new Localism Bill, we can still expect an interminable journey for every wind farm, railway, power line or energy-from-waste plant. RES’s five years to put even a modest wind farm on Dorset farmland (Times 10th June) shows that we retain a particular ability to be hypocritical about tackling climate change on the one hand and our back gardens on the other. It doesn’t help that infrastructure is often so grotesquely ugly […]

Categories: published work • Tags: competitions, mass product, overdesign, role model, sustainability

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Man vs Machine..flesh and blood is going to beat the damn monster

April 7, 2011 by chriswiseengineer

The Domesday Book and a digital 3D building model…are they by any chance related? Well, yes, if last week was anything to go by. Then I stood on a farm in Cornwall that is precisely, yet totally inaccurately shown in the Domesday Book as a “barren wasteland”. Its owner Mr Pengelly told me this with some pride, as he is the latest in a thousand year line of farmers there. Named after the Cornish “pen“, top, with “kelly“, copse, Farmer […]

Categories: published work • Tags: architecture, commoditisation, design

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Pity the Japanese earthquake engineers

March 7, 2011 by chriswiseengineer

In 1986 I helped design a new children’s hospital in California, a few miles from the San Andreas earthquake fault. Sitting safe at my desk the experience was fun, challenging, doodling quake-resisting systems, checking them by hand calculation. Then the Hospital was built, 300 sick children moved in, and I came back to the UK. Out of sight, out of mind, until October 17, 1989, when at 5:04 p.m a magnitude 6.9 earthquake struck San Francisco. The quake only lasted […]

Categories: published work • Tags: mastery, nature, responsibility

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A fine romance: The merger of CABE with the Design Council

February 7, 2011 by chriswiseengineer

This month we should be very happy, for something unexpectedly wonderful has arisen from the bonfire of the quangos. Out of the flames has emerged a new Design Council, now joined by CABE to give us something that no other country has to my knowledge…an integrated design body working across the whole spectrum from cities and buildings, via products, furniture and graphics through digital and communications all the way to health, wellbeing and the development of social policy. It might […]

Categories: published work • Tags: architecture, design, responsibility, role model

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Saving a trillion miles-worth of CO2

December 7, 2010 by chriswiseengineer

Now that the Chief Construction Adviser’s wittily-named Innovation and Growth Team has published 50 ways to change construction for a low carbon world, what can designers do to help its author? Paul Morrell’s report is welcome for its long view, but it is essentially a “big stick”….. it’s good for you, or else. There’s common sense about the wise use of building modelling tools, and lots about regulation. But there’s little on behaviour change (because we’ll legislate), and very little […]

Categories: published work • Tags: mass product, overdesign, sustainability

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On the coefficient of friction of sheep

November 7, 2010 by chriswiseengineer

The other day I chanced across my copy of that well-known academic paper on “The coefficient of friction of sheep”, which led me to think about the preoccupations of academics today. It would be so nice if some of their research was useful. By that I mean taking a cue from Robert Stephenson, who in 1845 commissioned a fantastic series of 1/6th life size bridge experiments from William Fairbairn in Millwall, a man who was not an academic but an […]

Categories: published work • Tags: design, education, experimental, performance, research, role model, spirit of enquiry

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Is a Pooping Man obscuring your view?

September 6, 2010 by chriswiseengineer

Off to Arup’s London Design Week event, where Antony Gormley talks about “Exposure”, his new 60 tonne latticework figure in the Netherlands. As he speaks, the sculpture is settling down for another night perched on its little spit of land surrounded by water. It reflects what its creator calls “the body as an energy system”. It is big, 26m tall even though squatting down, but tiny when seen from the nearest town of Lelystad. Nevertheless, one unimpressed local accuses it […]

Categories: published work • Tags: art and scupture, creativity, education, role model

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Why the Millennium Bridge plays Bossa Nova…

July 6, 2010 by chriswiseengineer

In my innocence I agree to speak on the cultural crossovers between Engineering, Architecture and Music. I will be in a trio with Ranulph Glanville, architectural theorist, and Michael Bochmann, violinist. Michael will bring his string orchestra, the Water City “band”, so we dovetail together into quite a posh concert. But my little part causes me considerable soul-searching. For this is all to take place as part of the cultural embrace of the London Festival of Architecture in the Great […]

Categories: published work • Tags: architecture, art and scupture, emotion, fun, mastery, nature

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Fighting the flab in buildings

May 6, 2010 by chriswiseengineer

In the early 90’s Paul Cross, one of Arup’s clever men, built a spread-sheet tool for our Commerzbank Tower project in Frankfurt…..an “Optimiser”. He made sure that the 18,000 tonnes of steel in the tower were all working at more than 90% of capacity. In the modern idiom, he ensured there was less than 10% wastage. The financially savvy client immediately tried to buy the Optimiser for 1.5 million Deutschmarks. Today, Clement Thirion, one of our own bright young things, […]

Categories: published work • Tags: education, experimental, mass product, overdesign, performance, research

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