BBC Radio 4 Interview: Chris Wise by Roger Law
Categories: published work • Tags: broadcasts, creativity, emotion, fun, role model
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Genomes, NASA and batteries made from bacteria at RAEng Global Grand Challenge Summit
The Royal Academy of Engineering hosted a pretty wonderful 2 day summit on the Grand Challenges facing the planet, and how engineers could respond to them. You can read about it here, on the blog from the summit: http://globalgrandchallengessummit.wordpress.com/ I had to give a thought piece provocation for the education debate, which you can see below: In its finer moments, engineering changes the physical world for the use and benefit of Man. Engineering is an art that uses science and is […]
Categories: published work • Tags: education, experimental, nature, research, responsibility, role model, spirit of enquiry
Locking horns over Sustainability….
Can engineers and architects learn to share sustainability? There is a call out from the Royal Academy of Engineering for Centres of Excellence in Sustainable Building Design. Prompted by propositional work done by the Academy over the past 5 years, led by Doug King, it hints at the evolution of a new breed of engineer who can integrate complex technological systems into buildings. In a sustainable fashion, whatever that means. The Academy is hoping to raise £30m or so to […]
Categories: published work • Tags: education, ignorance, research, responsibility, role model, skill, sustainability
Peter Rice remembered
Down in Frome, UFO country, I speak to an eclectic audience about footballer Bobby Charlton, and how attempting to shoot like him had influenced the anthropomorphic side of my engineering. How, as a small boy, I’d watched James Burke gripping the nation on the BBC as Apollo 8 disappeared behind the moon, triggering my own later search for technological thrills. I don’t mind talking about this stuff any more….I think it’s ok to be a nerd, ok to have heroes, […]
Categories: published work, reviews • Tags: experimental, mastery, role model, spirit of enquiry
Designing for the Great Recovery
On the train I overhear 3 old blokes talking: “I can’t get too excited about the Olympic swimming ‘cos you can only see their heads”….and I think of the captain of the Titanic saying something similar about icebergs. From the Titanic, it’s a natural jump to hear the construction industry saying the same thing about its use of materials. Watch out for the bit you can’t see, I want to shout! It’s gonna get you! Now we have Sophie Thomas […]
Categories: published work • Tags: astronomy, design, education, experimental, fun, mass product, role model, sustainability
Mastery and the tree-climbing fish….
Back from Brazil comes the Useful Simple Trust’s “Mr Sustainable”, Dan Epstein, with someone’s masterplan for us to review. It’s all rectangular, glass, no sense of place, sterility without redemption. “Absurd” is how our urban designer describes it. 2,000 years after Rome, 160 years after Haussmann, 40 years after Gaia, has our BRIC-ish masterplanner learned absolutely nothing? For there’s no plan, and we can’t detect a “master”. It’s a sadly familiar scenario. His design is ignorant of everything good that’s […]
Categories: published work • Tags: architecture, astronomy, mastery, nature, role model, skill, spirit of enquiry, sustainability
Why small practices are genetically important
If I were a rhinoceros not an engineer in a little practice, I’d be on the WWF’s endangered species list. My contribution to global diversity would be gazed at in wonder on national telly with David Attenborough. But it isn’t. Again, as a rhino, princely patrons at the head of worldwide organizations would try everything they could to feed and water me so I didn’t become extinct. Why? Because genetic variation is healthy. So why is the construction industry remorselessly […]
Categories: published work • Tags: commoditisation, mastery, role model, skill, spirit of enquiry
Preface review for the book: “The Size of Shape”, Agusti Obiol
Engineering is not an abstract condition….it is an Art practiced on behalf of society by a special subset of all human beings. One explanation of the special role of the structural engineer is to set up 3 dimensional space and to keep it there, for use, in the 4th dimension. Of course, every young child experiments with this, and so in our formative years we may all be engineers in general, and structural engineers in particular. In those early years […]
Categories: reviews • Tags: design, education, role model, spirit of enquiry
The arse-about-face design method for railway bridges
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
chris wise engineer 