30 March 2009

Bridges news roundup

Not much happening at Happy Pontist Towers right now ... I've a review of Peter Bishop's book "Bridge" in the offing, and another handful of bridge competition debris posts planned. Hopefully in the near future the losing entries to the Leicester River Soar and Dublin River Liffey bridge design competitions will be made public. There should also be announcements made of the winners in design contests in Rhyl and Worcester any day now.

Is there bridge news you think I should be covering? If so, post in the comments here.

Meanwhile, here's a quick news roundup to keep things ticking over ...

Naeem Hussain interviewed on Third Forth Crossing
Great to see a bridge engineer the focus of attention

Civic Trust Award for Castleford Footbridge
Partnership award for S-shaped structure

Supplied Clyde Arc hanger forks met specification
Claims Macalloy

Hakes bridge design takes it to Moscow
Pontist notes cat's cradle design to be inefficient but couldn't summon energy to comment further

5 comments:

Knit MN said...

Nice to see Naeem in the news - shame they got his name wrong!

The Happy Pontist said...

Yes, saw that, very odd, they did get it right in the profile of him, just not in the main interview.

Nielsen said...

Hi, I have recently found your website and posted some links, from your excellent posts, on my own blog.

I was wondering why engineers do not take back bridge design from architects? We talk about it a lot but never actually do it.

Great site!

The Happy Pontist said...

I think the main difficulty is that there are too few articulate, passionate, knowledgeable engineers who can communicate with the public (and with clients) in the way that architects can. Other than Chris Wise, who else is there in the UK, for example? It's a failure that starts with the engineering education system. There is also a failure of the institutions - bodies like the ICE simply have little interest in design, they focus on engineering science and on political initiatives, but have little understanding of the creative link in between.

Anonymous said...

who cares, if they are 'bridge designers' does it matter? i have worked for VERY well known engineers designing bridges with more architects in the team than engineers.