Climate Emergency
Nick Maclean is a member of the industry advisory panel for Brunel University and is a passionate advocate for change in the industry. Which he believes has led to civil/structural engineers in a culture where they are fearful of being innovative.
The climate emergency is possibly the most important issue of our era, and our civil/structural engineering education must reflect this. Over the past few years we have seen the launch of https://architectsdeclare.com<https://architectsdeclare.com/> and https://structuralengineersdeclare.com<https://structuralengineersdeclare.com/>, as well as the imminent launch of https://civilengineersdeclare.com<https://civilengineersdeclare.com/>.
The construction industry is pledging to set new priorities and develop better ways of working. Institutions, Academia and the industry as a whole must work together more closely by sharing information and best practice; together agreeing to drive rapidly towards zero carbon construction in support of the UK Government’s declared aim. There is no doubt that we have passed the point where we can afford to sit on the fence and wait for others. We have to set the pace of change and support the government and our clients in taking the steps to mitigate the climate change and biodiversity emergency that is plain for everyone to see.
Here at Ecos Maclean we have been concerned for many years with the poor appraisal/understanding of behaviour of existing buildings, even completely perverse, wrong analysis2 and diagnosis3, which has led to huge quantities of steel and concrete being used unecessarily4. We have been pointing these mistakes out since at least 19875 (analysis) and 19916, both a failure to apply Hooke’s Law. Now with things like the proposal to demolish at Chester Terrace, a substantially sound (a not significantly strained) balustrade and garden retaining wall only 750mm high (max), then rebuild in reinforced concrete on piles (See picture 1), means in our opinion, things have got very much out of hand in structural appraisal, and I need to do some louder whistleblowing.
So we are ‘cranking-up’ our publicising of examples of wasteful/inept planet wrecking by starting with a competition for the most pointless box-frame, a particularly generally egregious structure in modern refurbishment and extension projects. This competition on our LinkedIn page and to be the first of several categories of #fakeengineering, probably expanded into alternative worked examples in a book 40 Years of Sagging, Bulging and Cracking, or Awkward Questions to Ask Your Engineer, the title of a talk I gave to RIBA local associations some years ago.
The experience behind our opinions:- Nick Maclean has over 50 years of experience since starting as an apprentice engineer (1964) at Ove Arup & Partners on the Barbican Redevelopment, through 6 years (1976-84) in their specialist group to investigate building problems including the collapse of a part of Winchester Theatre (1980?), leaving OAP in 1984 to start his own practice but being recalled to OAP in 1987 to lead a team to investigate widespread problems of timber rot, deformations and large span roof deflections in the Grade 1 listed West India Dock Warehouses at Canary Wharf, and many appraisals of existing buildings since and presently, including several bits of Alexandra Palace. Nick had the good fortune to be taught Theory of Structures by the very practical Prof LL Jones (outspoken about Ronan Point in 1968), and lucky to work directly under leading, ‘go-to’ engineers such as Tony Stevens and Peter Rice on several, intensely engineered from first principles, high-tech buildings and be advised by Poul Beckman on historic buildings on which I now concentrate.
In 1987 Nick was credited with saving at least £1m in repairs on the West India Dock Warehouses and then in 2000 Nick stopped HilI Paul Mill in Stroud from being demolished as a Dangerous Structure (It wasn’t!) and helped turn it into 34 flats and 4 two storey penthouses were put on top with no strengthening needed.
In 1993, The Independent interviewed Nick as a follow-up to a ‘letter to the editor’ he wrote in response to an article Subsidence Without High Subsidy about huge costs for subsidence in London when actually the problem was mostly thermal expansion of long Victorian terraces in the heatwave of 1991, the wrong diagnosis resulting in huge volumes of pointless excavation and concrete underpinning. See article Diagnosis Without Foundation where a building was underpinned ‘further and deeper than man has gone before’ Nick said, pointing out it was moving sideways, not up and down! One of the 11 insurers I wrote to at the time appointed a loss adjustor to assess me, but he didn’t like the sound of the possibility Nick was going to significantly reduce his claims workload and basically said “Don’t call us, we’ll call you.” He supressed my observations.
Recently Nick heard of Client Earth and what they are set up to do from a solicitor employee (with some cracks in his house). My hope is that what an old Conservation Architect RIBA, MCIArb, describes as a fraud – selling something to somebody that doesn’t need it (such as box-frames) – will lead some influential NGO to take to task an engineering practice for such gross over-specification of unnecessary and unsustainable materials.
There are many more examples in Ecos Maclean’s dossier of modern, ‘designer by app’ and ‘copy and paste’ engineering that demonstrates a systemic problem with modern structural engineers, stemming we think from a total reliance on computer modelling. Before the ubiquitous use of computers for all calculations (Nick still use’s his slide rule), design involved working out what you needed, then choosing a section from tables that was a margin above what you had calculated – that margin depended on exercising judgement on the potential for future changes: maybe another floor could be added?
Now, with apps, a structural section is guessed, the loading requirements are input into an app and if result is many times oversized, the app says OK and the engineer presses on to the next element, does not go back and have another go with a smaller section to see if that is also ‘OK’. Maybe because fee competition these days does not allow it – and all engineers are doing the same thing!