“The steeling of the undergraduate mind”
or,
New Tools, New Temptations.
Pieter Sijpkes
School of Architecture
McGill University
SSEF annual joint engineers/architects meeting
Quebec City March 1 2014
Thomas Cole ‘The architect’s dream’ 1840
The Engineer’s dream,Thomas Hart Benton, 1931
Architecture with neither architects nor engineers
Cram's Unrivaled Family Atlas of the World, Chicago IL. Lithograph color print.
Iron was very scarce in all these
buildings
Cologne cathedral’s wrought iron roof 1850
Crystal Palace Cast Iron prefabricated frame 1851
The Eiffel tower among the ‘Old world’ buildings, and one of the
competing designs for a 300 M tower to be executed in granite!
Google wisdom:
Cast iron development
I
Thomas Telford, single-span
Thames bridge 1799
Stone vs cast iron
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/victorians/launch_vt_iron_bridge.shtml
Reform Act Tower 1832 proposal
Cast Iron
Centennial Tower London 1874
Original design of the Eiffel Tower
file:///C:/Philo-2014/towerlecture/The%20Project%20Gutenberg%20eBook%20of%20Elevator%20Syst
ems%20of%20the%20Eiffel%20Tower,%201889,%20by%20Robert%20M.%2
0Vogel.htm
http://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/collection/toureiffel?projectId=historic-moments
Chicago Competition 1890
London Competition entries 1890
Watkin’s tower in London, abandoned.
Haeckel vs. Tower designs
Eiffel-Shukhov comparison
Shukhov’s tower would have been higher than Eiffel’s
and weigh only half as much.
Only the lower radio communication tower was built.
The Singer Tower High-rise:
The steel frame
Statue of Liberty 1886: main structure,
outriggers, skin
Bilbao: main structure, outriggers, skin
Guggenheim Museum Bilbao resulted
in a unit steel price for the 3,900
tons of structural steel comparable
to a standard steel framed building
project and was a factor in the project
opening on-time and within budget.
Advances in the use of computers
for steel detailing and fabrication
now allow for the realization of
extremely complex projects which
perhaps ten years ago would have
been deemed impossible. It can now
be said that the versatility of steel
has been extended to new applications
in geometrically free-form
architecture.
Hal Iyengar is a Retired Partner,
Redundancy is a good thing
The Empire State building on fire
Redundancy is a good thing
Corruption is a bad thing
The leaning tower of Cartagena
Architect’s perspective view:
no columns!
Up up and away..
Firmitas, commoditas, venustas
Vitruvius 1st century BC
Culemborgh, Netherlands 1868 157 m. span
Eads Bridge St Louis Mi. 1874 Chrome steel 158 m. span
Halle au Ble Paris..200 years of construction
history in wood and wrought iron
The central marketpavilion restored thanks to Digicel