23 April 2002
The Architecture of teamwork
Buro Happold partner Paul Westbury presents some thoughts on the current state of teamwork in large construction projects
It is surprising to note how many engineers become enraged at the mention of the simple word ‘architect’. Notes are compared on who are the most difficult to work with and colourful stories swapped over lunch. It is interesting to reflect on why such discussions take place – is it simply a professional jealousy or a misunderstanding of what each profession is about? The engineering profession has certainly been well placed to track the changes that have occurred in the building business over the last century.
In a recent trip to Paris, I once again made the long journey up Gustav Eiffel’s 1000 ft wrought-iron tower. As the centrepiece for the Paris Universal Exposition of 1885; the celebration of France’s recovery from defeat in the Franco-Prussian War and the symbol for new technology in building, history shows that it was a glorious success. But at the time of its construction there were many that opposed the Eiffel Tower - either through fear of its collapse or through fear of it spoiling Paris’ classical skyline. Writers and artists were to dub the new construction the ‘Tower of Babel’ and claimed that it betrayed French taste and threatened French art and history. There was no doubting that this ‘science’ tower would have been unlike anything any Parisians would have seen before (or even imagined) and it is not surprising that its impending construction and a certain ‘fear of the new’ brought such intense discussion to the city.
This point in history is a fascinating one in several respects. With the birth of the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain in the 1780s, the nineteenth century was set to be one of the most exciting engineering playgrounds we have yet seen. Possibly, the most important feature of the era was that this particular revolution was not made possible (or indeed led) by generals, politicians or architects, but by engineers. Seen before this time as a rather clumsy, plodding, and often despised class of people, the engineers were now recognised as being responsible for providing the new infrastructure that the now prosperous societies were beginning to truly rely upon. James Nasmyth, the Scottish inventor of the steam hammer, confirmed that ‘These are indeed glorious times for the engineers’. Prince Albert was observed to say that ‘If we want any work done of an unusual character and send for an architect, he hesitates, debates, trifles; we send for an engineer, and he does it’.
James Fitch, a professor of architecture at Columbia, summarised as follows, ‘The nineteenth century saw three great developments in structural theory: the enclosure of great areas in the Crystal Palace, the spanning of great voids in the Brooklyn Bridge and the reaching of great heights in the Eiffel Tower. Each of these structures was, in a way, the product of a golden moment of equilibrium, brief in time, special in character, delicate in balance. Their significance was dissipated before men of adequate stature could again appear to grasp it.’
It is clear that the driver for this shift in emphasis was entirely down to the ‘step-change’ that had occurred in building technology – the idea to use iron in new and interesting ways. The three structures that Fitch mentions above were all new and imaginative landmark structures that had been made possible through the use of iron. As Eiffel himself said at the time of the Paris Tower competition, ‘Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance have pushed the use of stone to the extreme and it hardly appears possible to go further than our predecessors have with the same materials, especially since masonry construction techniques have not progressed notably for some time’. It is easy to see his point – the Washington Monument was the highest stone construction but only 555 ft tall, the European cathedral spires were smaller still and St Paul’s dome in London rose only 360ft above its surrounding streets. Eiffel himself had already constructed magnificent iron bridges over the Rivers Sioule, Douro and latterly the Truyere at Garabit where a central 540 ft span was built. This iron-based, machine-like technology had been tested in infrastructure and it seemed to be the answer for Eiffel’s new 1000 ft tall superstructure in Paris.
This technology ‘step-change’ must be marked down as one of the most important and influential that we have seen in the history of building. But it was by its very nature a new technology, and during the time that the materials were unfamiliar to most, engineers were given the opportunity to realise landmark structures that were based upon the inherent functional beauty of perfectly resolved mathematical formulae. It is for this reason that many structures of the era were built around simple, yet effective geometries that did not outwardly attempt to please through primary form, simply to create effective and functional products. It is exciting to look back at the birth of the ‘machine’ in building design and to the beginnings of the technologically advanced buildings that we recognise today.
So why is this relevant to the discussion? As the wider building industry became familiar with the new iron, and latterly steel, constructions, the engineers no longer held such a firm grip on form and design. Indeed, as building design moved into the machine age and onward into true modernism, architects themselves had not only caught up with the newer construction technologies, but had begun to use them to outwardly define their own buildings. But ask any architect about the significance of the nineteenth century and it would surely be a confirmation that building design moved from being the art of one, through the purer technology-based science of the engineer and onward into the collaboration of the multi-disciplined team. In the same way that some engineers still mourn the loss of control that their profession had developed in the direct aftermath of the Industrial Revolution, some architects refer bitterly to the extent of their marginalisation over that same period of time. In this context, it is understandable that architects and engineers would share jokes at each other’s expense!
However, what is clear to me is that building design, architecture and engineering are inclusive in their nature. The positive results that our profession demands can no longer be achieved by a single great name. It is in teams that we create the buildings of the future, where we can meet the demands of increasingly complex technologies, not only in enclosure but also in operation, comfort, cost and sustainability.
My own recent experience with wide-span structures is in many ways a pure engineering challenge: modern stadia profiles are determined by structural necessity rather than architectural whim. And yet none of these successful stadium designs would have come about in the same way without input from a multi-disciplinary team. While some engineers may choose to dwell on the ‘purer’ science of longspans, bridges or even high-rise, and some architects might concern themselves with self-styled post-modernism, both professions risk denying themselves the energy and inspiration that comes from teamwork. The relationship between the engineer and the architect is a truly symbiotic one, with the best results achieved only through true collaboration. It is a shame that occasionally we do not all share or promote this view for our mutual benefit.
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Buro Happold is a multi-disciplinary international practice of consulting engineers established in 1976 offering civil and structural engineering, mechanical and electrical engineering, quantity surveying, building services and environmental engineering, infrastructure and traffic engineering, geotechnical engineering, façade engineering, fire engineering, computational fluid dynamics analysis, access consultancy, project management, urban design and a range of specialist CAD services.
