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Last Friday, inspired by National Walk to Work week I walked to work, first to the Hub in King’s Cross, and then on to Oxford Circus. Here’s a few photos I took on the way to King’s Cross. I took a similar route on foot to that which I normally take on my bike, but being on foot I was much more inclined to stop and look at things en route. Highlights included trying out a new tree house climbing frame in Arundel Square and a precocious cat.
A big thank you to the lovely audience at Cafe Scientifique Brighton who welcomed me this evening for my talk, A World Tour of Structural Form. I felt very welcome indeed.
The aim of the talk was to share a number of basic structural engineering principles and to demonstrate how these can be used to explain how buildings stand up. The talk was illustrated with structures from around the world. I promised no maths and no equations. I stuck to my promise, and judging from the audience responses to my questions, I think this method worked!
This post is about rediscovering a childhood fascination for how things work, and the thoughts it has provoked about creating learning environments that harness that fascination for the purposes of education.
Notes on a few things that caught my engineer’s eye at the Migrations exhibition at the Tate Britain today.
‘Quickly Away Thanks to Pneumatic Doors’ and ‘Soon in the Train by Escalator’, both by László Maholy-Nagy, 1937 are two eye-catching information posters that explain how new technologies will work to improve passenger journeys. The posters are clear, without being patronising. It makes me wonder why we don’t do the same now to explain the engineering that is being employed to build the latest additions to the Tube. Right now in London, we have one of the largest infrastructure projects ever undertaken in the capital underway, Crossrail, and yet the project feels hidden rather than celebrated. More public civil engineering information posters please – I am sure they would be avidly read by young and old.
I recently returned from a conservation weekend at Hazel Hill wood, the sixth such weekend in which I have participated, and a visit that prompted some more thoughts on ways we can teach sustainability in universities.
