Holidays have intruded into work fun for the last 2 weeks, so I have some catching up to do. Here’s what I have learnt in that period though:
Fact No.1. Hours spent admiring Venice whilst visiting the city for the first time on project related business last week. None. Highly frustrating, particularly as it was time out from holiday.
Fact No.2. The number of excruciatingly dull hours of a colleague’s recent PowerPoint presentation to a client team in Estonia this week. Four.
Fact No.3. A consultant explaining why they wont be able to meet the deadline on your project because they are literally at the forefront of checking the Oslo bomb damage, trumps most other excuses.
Having been there a few weeks ago it’s reassuring how life returns to normal so quickly. The residents were out enjoying the sun; pavement cafés were full etc.
Fact No.4. When on holiday don’t attempt to drag small children around the Le Corbusier designed house at the Weissenhof-Siedlung in Stuttgart Whilst it’s great, iconic etc. it’s a museum and there is nowhere to sit them so reluctant toddlers have to be carried. Which is hard work and the architecture students tut at you.
Fact No.5. In the very same museum there is a quote from the builders saying that these new fangled straight-lined, spare and rectilinear buildings are going to prove to hard to build and wouldn’t catch on.
Fact No.6. The Porsche Museum in Stuttgart is very swish. Even more so if you have small children as they usher you through the back way via ultra clean laboratory white rooms.
Fact No.9. Engineers are increasingly falling for being ‘Starngineers’ (as in the slightly pejorative term ‘Starchitects’). Two recent examples of projects for review where the golden rules of deconstructing a problem and then formulating a response using the basic componentry of critical thought, were disregarded in favour of coming up with ideas that they think an engineer working at the forefront of modern hi-tech architecture SHOULD be suggesting.
The concepts had flashy bits but the combination was nonsensical, the flashy bits were counter-productive. A blithe assumption had created a problem that in turn amplified another, in an illogical spiral of invention. This annoyed me for some time
Fact No.8. A recent design of a corbel supporting a mega truss proved it could support the equivalent of the entire catch of herring in the St Louis seaway in one year, or enough waste to nearly fill three Olympic swimming pools or equal the weight of HMS Liverpool, a cruiser in the Royal Navy during the First World War.
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