Recently, while discussing structural details in the office, I have found myself thinking about the role of critique in engineering and how that differs from its role in architecture. There are a few threads to this topic that are only partly related, starting with this blog: I occasionally write what can be considered architectural, engineering, preservation, or planning criticism. That doesn’t mean I must be a critic, and I’m not. It means that I’m writing, in part, to clarify my thinking about the issues I see professionally.
The Happy Pontist – an engineer with one my favorite pseudonyms – said a great deal about this topic several years ago: here. He was discussing bridge critique, but the issues involved in building engineering make it even more difficult to apply criticism. Bridge structures are, more or less, visible; buildings structures are typically not. He quotes Alan Holgate’s The Art in Structural Design – a fascinating book regardless of this discussion – on what structural engineering criticism might look like. I like the idea of the critic having to be educated in the field and writing for a similarly educated audience. Most people associate engineering with safety, so a criticism of a building’s structure might be interpreted as a statement tat the building is unsafe, even if what the critic meant is that the structure could have been designed more efficiently, or greener, or in a manner that better fits the architecture. Holgate’s discussion of engineering criticism can be read online: here.
If I’m recommending criticism, I must have a goal in mind. As an engineering student who took a number of architecture classes, I was horrified by the student-led critiques I saw. The architecture students would work for 20 or 30 hours straight on models or drawings, set them up in the classroom, and then be savaged by their peers. Even if there were useful ideas in the discussion, they were buried in a mass of personal attacks and vitriol, and usually delivered in pretentious language copying whichever theorist had been most recently read. If you want to say something is crap, say so. It’s an honest opinion, if not particularly useful. Fortunately, I don’t see a lot of structure that I think is crap, so I don’t have to say that often. The purpose of structural critique is improvement. I’ve said many times that engineers learn from mistakes: in order to learn from a mistake, you have to know what was wrong.
The simplest example I can think of is the Kansas City Hyatt Regency collapse. There are many important lessons in that tragedy regarding responsibility and structural design. Here’s how critique can help: using two channels welded toe-to-toe as an ersatz box beam is a terrible design. Even without the failure, that would have been a bad idea because of the weakness of welding the curved ends of the flanges. Using nuts anywhere but the end of a rod is a bad idea, as it requires the entire rod to be threaded. Using a rod-hung structure to support heavy dynamic loading (like crowds) isn’t necessarily terrible, but it should trigger a study of vibration and fatigue. And here we are: three conclusions regarding design in one paragraph.
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