In my innocence I agree to speak on the cultural crossovers between Engineering, Architecture and Music. I will be in a trio with Ranulph Glanville, architectural theorist, and Michael Bochmann, violinist. Michael will bring his string orchestra, the Water City “band”, so we dovetail with quite a posh concert. But my little part causes me considerable soul-searching. For this is all to take place as part of their cultural embrace of the London Festival of Architecture in the Great Hall of the Institution of Civil Engineers. Not a venue where fools are suffered gladly.

I meet Ranulph for breakfast near the Festival Hall, and over scrambled eggs we decide to blindfold the concert audience in the drinks break and ask them to wander about chanting pure vowel sounds.....so that they can really tune themselves in to each other and to the great architectural spaces through which are moving. Reverberation, grand architecture, humans....the links should all be marvellously clear. Three days later our jolly wheeze is ruled out by Health and Safety, so we are left with nothing but the chance to ruin a perfectly good concert with our unrehearsed ramblings.

Then I remember other bits of musical engineering interaction; the late lamented engineer Tony Fitzpatrick and I once called the bluff of some eminent property developers on how train rumbles might affect their buildings over railways. We advertised a physical demo of the rumbles.... Everyone arrived at a big conference room we’d furnished with an impressive hi-fi and some giant loudspeakers, which were all switched off. Out of sight, turned on under the table was a springy lump of steel which magnetically shook with recordings of real trains. The lump was so big that its wobbles could set off a harmonic response in the floor and the walls.

After a rather fine discussion about acoustics and the technicalities of human perception. someone said “I’m fed up with mumbo-jumbo.....when are you going to start the train vibrations?”. Of course, from the moment he walked in the unseen steel lump had been shaking both him and the floor and he hadn’t felt a thing.

Chris Manning the acoustician then explained how the walls, floors and volumes of a building could be a musical instrument.... just like Michael Bochmann’s violin.

Natural harmonics, from atoms to tides, walls to bridges to violins. When we walk, each foot comes down about once a second. Our resting heart pumps at about a beat a second. Most natural things have a fundamental rhythm, and some, say a hummingbird or a Ferrari engine, a vibration so pure that they make a recognizable musical note..I found myself thinking, if only our ears were as big as parachutes, we could “hear” the built environment and wouldn’t that be quite something?

Here was a cue for the cultural crossover. Take the Millennium Bridge, from my own past. Arup’s seminal paper gives three fundamental wobbling frequencies, one for each span, which I convert into very deep musical notes. Eight octaves below middle C, way below the threshold of human hearing, you’d need a violin the size of a battleship to play them.

Play those same notes in a higher harmonic and we can hear the natural voice of the bridge. Michael Bochmann lent me his double bass player who played the first note, the pure vibration of the north span....which turned out to be a very very low C. A whale in Antarctica wrote in to complain. Then a cello played the south span, a G. You may know these are harmonically linked as part of a C chord, but surely that’s just a fluke. What would the middle span do.....could the bridge complete the chord with an E, or would it dissolve into a discordant racket? Logic said it should be a discord. Another cello played the note....and it wasn’t the rest of the C chord, but a B.

Then they all played together, and at that moment the beauty and exquisite irony of the natural world and our interaction with it were revealed. For if you add B to C and G, you don’t just get a boring old C chord (like the first chord of the national anthem). Instead, the B turns it into the chord of C major seventh. In our culture, we hear that as jazz, but it’s even more popular in Latin dance....in tango, samba and mambo. So there we are in the Institution’s Great Hall...the strings playing the natural sound of the Millennium Bridge, a great all consuming Cmaj7th chord. Over the top of it, Michael Bochmann plays “The Girl from Ipanema” on his ancient violin, the ode to Brazilian girlhood, the audience sway, and all is well with the world. How appropriate, after all its troubles, that the Millennium Bridge is not just wobbling, it’s singing a bossa nova.

Chris Wise, 1st july 2010

The Global Fellowship is a Department for Education initiative which sends 100 promising young adults to Brazil, India and China to learn about the global economy. On their return the Fellows are required to produce a short documentary, photographic or written piece about their experience to present to a variety of audiences, from school children to senior politicians. The workshop, run by media professionals, was designed to give them the tools to do this, as well as teaching them how to handle hostile or negative interviews with the media.

Held at the British Council offices in July, the intensive one-day event was co-ordinated by Think Up associates Sabine Pusch and Oliver Broadbent. Sabine brought her 20 years’ experience in broadcast media to bear, ensuring that the core skills needed were taught to the highest standard. In order to maintain the classic Think Up style of hands-on, participative learning, the workshop was designed as a series of ‘carousel stops’, where smaller groups each concentrated on the following elements: storytelling (how to structure a good story); interview skills (the art of a good interview and how to deal with difficult questions); photographic techniques (how to use a video and stills camera), and editing skills (how to hone the recorded material into an entertaining and informative piece).

The finale of the training workshop was a ‘press gaggle’, inspired by the US TV series The West Wing. During this session, half of the group played the role of an aggressive press corps in a staged press conference, while the other half attempted to answer their questions. The aim was to give participants further practice at handling hostile media situations as well as encouraging them to think more like a journalist when approaching their own pieces.

Think Up used Greengaged model to deliver a workshop that was highly participative, establishing the problem as a design challenge, and prompting the participants to design their way through it. Representatives from thirteen different colleges, as well as from the LDA, the LSC, ConstructionSkills and SummitSkills took part in the day’s proceedings.

The outcomes from the workshop, captured on multicoloured post-it notes attached to the walls of Eversheds’ gleaming meeting room (with a distracting view of the city), will be published in a report, which will forwarded to the LDA’s Low Carbon Skills Forum, BIS and DEC; it will also be available for download from this website.

Read more about the workshop on the project page.

The event took place in the Big Rig, a three-storey scaffolding frame created by Think Up as a flexible and robust venue for action learning.

Designed and facilitated by Think Up, and Commissioned by Podium Skills London, Low Carb was designed by Think Up to be transformative and empowering learning experience. Through the intensity of competition and exposure to low-carbon principles and technologies, the participants identify for themselves how they can make the most of the opportunities in the low-carbon construction sector. As part of the event, participants meet representatives from local colleges to find out how they can get the training that they need.

The event was a tremendous success, exceeding the high expectations of all involved. After two days both teams had successfully built an insulated shower cubicle supplied by cold and hot water, supplied by rainwater and heated by the sun to a tepid 33 degrees. A number of participants from the event will be going forward onto training courses within Colleges as well as a number of work placement opportunities that have been offered by a major construction contractor in London.

The Big Rig, conceived by Think Up as a nine metre cubed three storey scaffolding frame, is a robust and flexible venue for outdoor action learning. Its size and physical presence contribute to the excitement of the learning experience. At Low Carb the Big Rig introduced the complexity of arranging the shower components in three dimensional space. Having been plumbed up to spray water on the participants and irregular intervals, the Big Rig was also used to supply the rainwater for the event.

The Big Rig concept has generated significant interest from HE, FE and schools sectors. Think Up will develop proposals to develop the Big Rig into a fully demountable classroom that can tour the country and be used for a whole range of action learning activities.

During Low Carb, the forty or so participants will be given a design and build challenge: working in two teams they must convert a pile of low-carbon technologies - solar panels, solar-thermal water heaters, insulation - together with a heap of timber, pipes and buckets to build a low-carbon shower. They must collect their own water, pump it and heat it naturally.

The event is being hosted in the Big Rig, a three-storey scaffolding frame conceived by Think Up as robust and flexible venue for action learning. For Low Carb, the Big Rig has been plumbed up to provide the 'rainwater' for the shower systems; it provides a frame onto which components can be fixed; the Rig brings a spatial challenge to the event; and adds to the sense of wow!

During the event participants will have the opportunity to meet representatives from local FE colleges who will tell them more about how they can get the training the low-carbon construction skills they need.

Low Carb has been designed by Think Up for Podium Skills London.

Podium Skills London works to ensure that the unemployed and unskilled of the Olympic boroughs can make the most of the training and employment opportunities that the Games have to offer. But as 2012 draws closer, the attention must shift to the longer-term market for construction skills. The provision of low-carbon housing stands out as the area that has the greatest potential to deliver jobs: Government legislation requires all new-build homes to be zero carbon by 2016; the Government has also set challenging carbon emissions targets for 2050 – 75% of the building stock that is set to exist in 2050 is already built and will need to be refitted in order to meet these targets. Not only is the provision of low-carbon construction skills training in step with the ethos of the Games, but trained workers would also be set to benefit from the redevelopment of the Thames Gateway, a development which is now touted as being Europe’s largest green development zone.

Our response is Low Carb during which 40 participants will use a collection of low-carbon technology components from the construction industry to build a low-carbon all-weather shower facility. The exercise is specifically designed both to reveal to participants the emerging challenges of the low-carbon agenda and also that they can play a useful part in addressing these challenges. The aim is to inspire those taking part to take up training in construction and in due course low carbon construction – confident that this is an employment area with a strong future.

Read more here

As part of Think Up’s Engineering Conversations project we are working with engineers to develop new ways for them to tell their story. Rather than the traditional carrousel of uninspiring Power Point slides, three Expedition engineers were given the challenge of describing a number of the company’s key projects using sketches alone. The students sat in the round while the engineers sat a low table in the middle, and drew their way through the projects, drawing their way through the key structural features for each job.



This method has advantages for both the presenter and audience. The process of drawing gives the presenter time. The pace of the presentation is dictated by the speed of drawing and the process of allows the presenter to think through what they are going to say. The audience gets unprecedented access to the engineer’s thought processes and their perception of the world: a perception characterised the understanding of relationships in 3-dimensional space.



By all accounts the presentation was a great success. The engineers, daunted by the prospect of drawing in front of an audience for a whole hour were surprised by just how quickly the session passed and just how engaged the students were throughout. The students delighted to have had such efforts lavished upon them – a presentation quite unlike the rest that they had seen during their week in London.

Student Studio is designed to help students get the most out of their week spent in an engineering design office. It removes that question of the supervising engineer, uttered in dispair the moment the student walks in through the door, “What am I going to give them to do?” Student Studio is the answer. It is a suite of design projects that work experience students can work through semi-independently during their week in the office. It doesn’t replace shadowing, participating in meetings or going on site; but it does give students a project (a microcosm of a real project) that they can call their own, through which they can demonstrate their own initiative, and to which they can point to and say I did that.

According to Expedition’s Ruth Hopgood-Oates, the company used to have to be quite restrictive of the number of school-aged work experience students it took on because “however much we like having students in the office, it used to take a lot of time out of an engineer’s time to supervise them”. She went on to say, “this year we successfully took on more work experience students than ever before”. Project Engineer Alex McCredie said “it felt good to be actually giving the students something meaningful to do without the burden of having to dream something up myself”.

The 2009 Edition saw two of the usual suspects being built: the Naples airport interchange, a small-scale version of an actual project by Expedition Engineering, and the mini-Gherkin : a mini-London icon hanging in wild Norfolk.

The third project is a newcomer and for the second year in a row, new is green at the Constructionarium: following on the rammed earth project experience, the 2009 new project is a circular hempcrete tower. This 3.5m diameter, 5.2m high timber structure has been designed from scratch by David W. and Ben G. Its main feature is its cladding material: hempcrete. Latest in eco-chic in the UK according to David W, .hempcrete is a mixture of hemp shiv and lime with pretty good environmental properties. Although a little suspicious about it at first, the students happily worked their way through it.

Once again the students have proved themselves very good, finishing their projects on time and budget, and if clearly better at solving 3 dimensional differential equations of 21 unknowns than at getting nails in plywood at the beginning of the week, by Friday, anything from concrete pouring to shuttering hempcrete was no longer a mystery.