Seeing these older buildings has prompted a mild interest in heritage, which I will pursue through the upcoming Engineers Australia heritage group in Hobart. Their presentation at the end of the month is about the old infrastructure in the wharf areas of Hobart. Although the physical relics are interesting in their own right, my interest is one step removed from what is left behind in the physical world.
My thinking turns towards the people involved in designing and building these structures. I wonder what life was like in those times, and how the problem of building large structures might have been in some ways similar, and in some ways different to the modern day approach.
Without much expertise in the field of heritage, I'd like to imagine that they were simpler times, and that most people took on challenges with a good work ethic. The reason I tend to be optimistic about the approach taken is largely based on the remaining structures that we can still see, and often strong enough to still enjoy and be functional, decades later.
By modern standards, these structures tend to be overly elaborate and over designed for what they need to do. Our new materials and new computer based design processes have allowed us to build the bare minimum to meet the needs of the end customer. If there are complications, then any additional materials or work are carefully monitored, to ensure maximum efficiency or minimal "waste".
My idealistic view of the bygone era is that is a designer or builder had a good idea or a good way to achieve a certain effect, they would be more inclined to use this knowledge, relative to the modern situation we find ourselves in. This is because of a few things, being a level of uncertainty about the solution actually working, and also the more commercially competitive environment which is enabled due to technological breakthroughs in telecommunications.
If you're not sure something will work, you will tend to build it bigger and better, just to be sure that it will work safely during straining events that you did not really plan for. The Sydney Harbour Bridge seems to be quite large for what it does. The effect of competition is to put pressure on cost in addition to the challenge of solving the problem, so that you make an attractive offer and get selected initially, which secures the potential to earn future work.
More and more often I find myself pondering if another shift could ever take place, either back to the way things were, or a new phase altogether. I think there is something lacking when you build structures that are largely based on objective measures like minimising costs using complex methods, and using one project only as a stepping stone towards continued work and growth of the business.
Although our technology would seems amazing to those people involved back then, I think we have a lot to learn from them in better appreciation of form, rather than always scraping the barrel on function.
Perhaps something like the old old hymn "Tell me the old old story ….."
Kurt Pudniks is a civilian engineer (MIEAust CPEng) working in Hobart.