Archive by category | Engineering

Show home for the Red Planet

Posted by Barbara Kiser | Categories: , , , ,

Mars show home at the Royal Observatory Greenwich, London.

A big red igloo with a towering antenna seems a little overblown for a London show home. And so it proves. The object squatting outside the Royal Observatory Greenwich is actually a life-sized mock-up of a Mars habitat, billed as the imaginary dwelling of a second wave of settlers from Earth. That is, those who might live on the Red Planet in their thousands by around 2037, if the ambitious plans of space entrepreneurs such as SpaceX’s Elon Musk bear fruit.  Read more

The art of engineering: 9 Evenings revisited

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The art of engineering: 9 Evenings revisited

I’m gazing at a stage draped in white when a giant zipper suddenly appears, projected onto one wall. As it works its way noisily around, more projections — live-streamed or pre-recorded moving images of buildings, blurred pedestrians, discarded clothing and simmering water — judder on crumpled backdrops. An apparently random urban soundtrack lulls and roars in the background. In the foreground, performers skip rope and cut hair; one solemnly rips up, boils and eats her shirt. It’s quite an evening.  Read more

Smoke on the water

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Smoke on the water

Nobody loves disasters more than movie producers. If threats in real life matched their frequency on screen, we should be in a constant state of panic over the risks of alien invasions, zombie viruses and asteroid impacts. Given the film industry’s appetite for catastrophes, it is no surprise that it has finally focused on the greatest environmental disaster in US history: the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico that began with explosions that killed 11 people and sank the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig.  Read more

Master builder: Ove Arup

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Ove Arup by Godfrey Argent, 1969

He was the structural innovator behind Sydney Opera House, founded the world’s leading engineering consultancy, and pioneered the philosophy of “total design” — the equal partnership of engineers, architects and designers in construction. Anglo-Danish engineer Ove Arup (1895-1988) is now celebrated in this first retrospective of his work, Engineering the World, at London’s Victoria and Albert (V&A) Museum, part of its Engineering Season.  Read more

Industrial optimist: Moholy-Nagy revisited

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László Moholy-Nagy Dual Form with Chromium Rods, 1946 (Plexiglas and chrome-plated brass)

I’m standing in the spiraling rotunda of New York’s Guggenheim Museum, and over me dangles a chaotic mess held together by translucent Plexiglas. In the shadow the sculpture casts on the wall, the shapes converge in a pleasing negative blending intention and happenstance – impossible to predict, yet clearly part of a plan. On evidence, this is an artist thinking experimentally, and in multiple dimensions.  Read more

Five books for the COP negotiator

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Five books for the COP negotiator

George Orwell, author of dystopian classics Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, was a political animal par excellence. He understood how the language of politics could give “an appearance of solidity to pure wind”, as he put it in his 1946 essay Politics and the English Language. Those words should blast right through the miasmas forming over Paris as COP21 enters its second week.  Read more

Suspended animation: Calder’s sculptural revolution

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Alexander Calder's mobile Black Widow, c. 1948 (wire and painted metal), Instituto de Arquitetos do Brasil, São Paulo.

She hangs dark, immense and pocked with holes in a white room, a beast of many parts languidly revolving in the air. Part leaf, part lever, all magisterial grace, Black Widow is a quintessential Calder mobile — one of the signature inventions of the extraordinary twentieth-century artist-engineer.  Read more

To the lighthouse: luminous physics, art and literature

Posted by Barbara Kiser | Categories: ,

Bell Rock Lighthouse. Steel engraving by John Horsburgh after J. M. W. Turner, 1824.

In John Singer Sargent’s curious 1885 portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson and his wife, the novelist seems to be escaping from the composition. The author of Treasure Island, Kidnapped and the hallucinogenic Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was famously restless, and after sailing the South Seas, died in Samoa in 1894. As it turned out, that love of saltwater, ships and extreme adventure had a solid physical base: lighthouses.  Read more