Architecture Hand In Hand With Civil Engineering

The cover image of this article is a photograph taken during the construction of the George Pompidou Centre in Paris. It depicts Peter Rice, Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers sitting on top of a gerberette (one of the prefabricated structural elements of the building). And what a powerful image it is! It emanates the strength in the connection between the Architects (R. Rogers & R. Piano) and the Engineer (P. Rice), who have mounted the masterpiece of their joint efforts (the gerberette).

The building itself, the Centre George Pompidou, is an iconic embodiment of the potential of interdisciplinary collaboration.

In 2015, when I joined Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners for the first time, the office was still housed in the Thames Wharf Studio in London, and boasted an enviously spacious model workshop. In it, among impeccably crafted models and other objects of admiration, was a scaled down model of a Gerberette, painted in luminous orange. Its presence was a beacon of one of the most essential and yet widely overlooked principles of architectural design, namely that excellence results when architects and engineers truly work hand in hand.

My appreciation of this principle was initially ignited in the Department of Architecture and Civil Engineering at the University of Bath, which is renowned for upholding the practice of interdisciplinary collaboration.

In my previous CritDay post, I introduced to you a proposal for a new Train Station in the city of Oxford, which a team of fellow students (Joshua Page, Scott Easter, Samuel Kalejaye and Carlos DeMalchi) and I designed in the Architecture School at Bath. The project was developed as part of the Department’s annual flagship Basil Spence competition, which takes place during the first semester of Final Year. Students from the degrees of Architecture and Civil Engineering are brought together in interdisciplinary teams to work on a large scale design project, under the premise that exemplary and enduring design results from the collaboration of the two fields.

In fact, the Basil Spence project is not the first instance when a interdisciplinary project is integrated in the program of the Architecture School at Bath. The essence of collaboration between architects and engineers is introduced from day one of the degree and is reinforced throughout the years.

The very first project that I embarked on as a first year student was to design, and thereafter build in full scale, a sculptural structure, working in a mixed group of architecture and civil engineering students.

In retrospective, I can clearly see that this is an ingenious way for the department to kick off our education. As students from both degrees are blissfully unaware of the widely perceived barriers between the tasks of architects and engineers, we all dove into the project partaking in every aspect of it. Civil engineering students were not hesitant to partake in the conceptual design stage while architecture students were getting involved in the physics and ‘workings’ of the projects. What an enriching experience!

To my greatest surprise and joy, I observed a very similar form of collaboration even in our Final Year during our work on the Oxford Train Station proposal. The efforts of the two disciplines were brought together from the very offset of the project. The engineering students expressed strong passion for contributing to the conceptual design strategy, while on the other hand we, the architecture students, were expressing a strong understanding of engineering principles.

The design intent of the project, proposed by my group, was to bridge the gap between the passengers and the public, by creating a concourse space that will be shared by both. Moreover, we wanted to celebrate the travel by train and reignite the excitement about it. Hence, we elevated the trains on platforms, so that they could be visible to the eye of the passenger and the member of the public from every part of the building, both on its outside and inside. The mutual appreciation on the side of both architects and engineers for one another’s work and devotion to enhancing it was the key to developing a proposal that executes an architectural intent by pushing engineering boundaries.

I would very much like to dedicate this post to all the fantastic engineering students I had the honour to work with during my Part 1 studies at the University of Bath; And in particular to Carlos DeMalchi, who has proven to be one of the most kind, talented and passionate people I have ever collaborated with!