An Engineer Imagines E-Book

Peter Rice

• Herausgeber: Batsford
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 314

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

The long-awaited reissue of the autobiography of Peter Rice, one of the main structural engineers behind the Sydney Opera House, the Pompidou Centre, the Menil Collection and Lloyd's of London. 'I am an engineer. Often people will call me an 'architect engineer' as a compliment. It is meant to signify a quality of engineer who is more imaginative and design-orientated than a normal engineer... To call an engineer an 'architect engineer' because he comes up with unusual or original solutions is essentially to misunderstand the role of the engineer in society.' An Engineer Imagines is a rare look into the professional creativity and philosophy of Peter Rice, who was widely acclaimed as the greatest structural engineer of his generation. He was a man who, in Renzo Piano's words, could design structures 'like a pianist who can play with his eyes shut'. Working with many of the world's greatest architects on buildings that became icons of contemporary architecture, he brought a uniquely poetic feeling to his work. Joining Ove Arup & Partners in 1956, Rice had heard that 'it was a place where an oddball could fit in.' Taking on Arup's theory of Total Design to heart, Rice writes about the role of the engineer in society, and how he himself applied his creativity to various projects. He admits he became an engineer by accident, tentatively feeling his way through a career without a natural instinct. But as he takes you through each of his projects, one-by-one, you can trace his development from graduate to veteran. Written in clear and poetic language, Rice's autobiography is perfect for those who want to better understand postwar buildings, our concrete environment, or are budding students of engineering and architecture.

Leseprobe

Preface

Many times during Peter’s career he was approached to write a book about his work. Unfortunately it wasn’t until he became ill that he found the time to do so. He always had a very specific idea about what sort of book he wanted to create – not a textbook about how to solve technical problems but a personal account of the joy and enthusiasm he took from his profession. More than anything Peter wanted to communicate the limitless potential of the engineer’s role in pushing back the frontiers of the built environment. Consequently it was very important to him that An Engineer Imagines should be accessible to all and not just to an architectural or engin-eering élite.

To achieve this we know Peter was greatly helped by Barbara-Ann Campbell whose editorial criticism and assistance during the writing of the book proved invaluable. During preparation of the book for publication she has been assisted by Gilly Graham, John McMinn, and Hugh Dutton, with editorial support, discussion with publishers, design and preparation of the manuscript and illus-trations. We would also like to thank Caroline Wayne, Peter’s personal secretary, for her secretarial support and assistance over many years.

As well as to those mentioned above, the family would also like to say a heartfelt thank you to all those people whose support, encouragement and friendship made it possible for Peter to complete An Engineer Imagines despite the emotional and physical pressures of his illness. They are:

Rudolph Archer, Katie Brown, Joy Clarke, Kitty Gibney and family, Lex Hall, Robin Jarossi, Paul Jenkins, Frank Moore, Peggy Muncer, Maurice Rice and family, Paul Rudin, Deborah Sutherland, Chrissie Watson; Jonathan Watson and family; Paul Andreu; Jack Zunz, Tom Barker, Bob Emmerson, Stuart Irons, John Martin, Duncan Michael, John Thornton, David Glover, Sophie Le Bourva, Alistair Lenczner, Andy Sedgwick, Jane Wernick and all those at the Ove Arup Partnership; Humbert and Viviane Camerlo; Michael Dowd; Paul Winkler and all those at the Menil Foundation; Renzo and Milly Piano, Shunji Ishida and all those at the Renzo Piano Building Workshop; Martin Francis, Henry Bardsley, Huguette Boutin and all those at RFR; Ian Ritchie and Jocelyn van den Bossche; Richard and Ruthie Rogers; Frank Stella; Monseigneur Vilnet; John Young; Michael Rose; Dr Michael Weir and all those at the Bristol Cancer Help Centre; Dr Dasgupta; Jan Souridis; Dreas Reyneke; Mr Henry Marsh, Dr Brada and all those at the Royal Marsden Hospital, London.

Although Peter was unable to write these acknowledgments himself, he wrote a poem in May 1992 which we think expresses how much the support of his friends meant to him, especially in the last year of his life. We would like to dedicate ‘Time to Go’ to all the close-knit friends mentioned above and those whom we may have inadvertently missed out.

Tonight I know that I will leave

The fight is done

And slowly as I say goodbye

I need to speak

And say my love for close-knit friends.

Support, support was what they gave

They made me live.

To die, not old, cocooned in love

Transferring through a point in time

To somewhere else

A gift we have no right to ask

And it is mine.

My brainwaves span the cool night air

And tap goodbye to friends unseen.

Will they go on and span in time

My after life

I’d like to know.

Thank you all.

Sylvia, Julia, Heidi, Kieran, Nemone and Nicki.

January 1993

Contents

Preface

Introduction

  1     Beaubourg

  2     Early Life

  3     Sydney

  4     Ove Arup the Man

  5     The Role of the Engineer

  6     Jean Prouvé

  7     Menil

  8     Fabric

  9     Glass and Polycarbonate

10     Details: Steel at Beaubourg, Concrete at Lloyd’s

11     Stone: Pavilion of the Future, Seville

12     The Critic and the Photograph

13     Working with Industry

14     The Fiat Experience

15     The Chameleon Factor

16     The Full-Moon Theatre

17     Architecture in Movement

Epilogue

Buildings and Projects: A Chronology

Bibliography

Illustration Credits

Appendix 1: Peter Rice

Appendix 2: RFR

Index

Introduction

It turns out that con artists aren’t much different from just plain artists. Like them they come in all sizes and shapes. Some are good at their job, others ineffectual, while some, like the fellow who introduced me to Peter Rice, operate in such a zany way that their motives remain obscure and unfathomable.

Responding to what now seems to have been a pretty far-fetched proposal I built a ten-foot-wide model of a footbridge – a spray-painted jumble of aluminium whose enlargement was meant to span the Seine. Since it matched his brightly coloured vision, my Parisian agent was pleased. He wanted to show it to France’s minister of public works, but first he needed an engineering opinion. He asked Peter to look at my model. Surprisingly, Peter showed up.

‘Well, what do you want to know?’ he asked after walking around the maquette a few times. I thought, ‘Oh boy, I’m really in over my head now’, but managed to ask as casually as possible, ‘Do you think it’s buildable?’ He looked at the model of the bridge again and responded ‘Yes.’ I didn’t believe him for a second. Then I began to realize what that ‘Yes’ meant. Sure it was buildable – buildable by him, not me. But, fortunately, there was more to it than that. Somehow, even though he communicated a questioning, perhaps conditional, sense of approval he did it in such a way that the recollection makes me happy to this moment. It seems the ‘Yes’ implied that the model might be worth developing if we could work it through, if, first, I could only make myself clear about my idea for the bridge.

We never got very far on the bridge, but later we did get pretty far on a museum proposal for the Dutch town of Groningen. On that project I got lucky. A simple, communicable idea popped out at me from a Dover book of Chinese lattice designs. Twisting one of its leaf shapes made a wonderful roof plane for our building model. When Peter asked me what was the idea behind the wavy roof I could say proudly, ‘It’s like a leaf.’ Once he had a handle, once he could grasp the image, Peter just rolled on like a juggernaut, crushing the obstacles of practicality and cost, making it possible for us to build what we liked.

I guess it’s obvious that Peter is a national treasure but I feel the truth is that he is a universal treasure. Just to be around him makes you want to think, think as hard as you can. Even when the results are worthless and the efforts futile Peter has helped me realize what a privilege it is to be able to think at all.

Frank Stella, California, USA 1992

Aerial view of the Pompidou Centre, Paris.

1

Beaubourg

Beaubourg, or the Centre Pompidou, as it is now called, is for me the beginning of my real career. In early 1971 I had been working in the Structures 3 group at Ove Arup & Partners in London, where I had been since returning from Sydney and the USA in the spring of 1968. The work in Structures 3 was a mixture of special cable and fabric structures, mostly with Frei Otto in Germany, and conventional building work in the UK. The Centre Beaubourg competition seemed an opportunity to experiment. The competition was run by the French government and the project seemed to us real and likely to be built. It was the Cartesian clarity of the French administrative approach which persuaded us that here at last was a competition where one could expect everything to work properly. Of course today, having lived through the experience, we wouldn’t be so naive, but then we believed; looking back, we were right to believe.

We, that is Structures 3 at Ove Arup & Partners – a group run by Ted Happold, where I was an associate – had been introduced to the architect Richard Rogers by Frei Otto. Ted had been approached by Richard about a competition for a new stand for Chelsea football ground. Frei had told Richard that he always worked with the engineers from Structures 3 at Ove Arup & Partners in London and together we made the submission, which was not successful, for the Chelsea football ground stand.

As we sat thinking we realized that a good reason for entering competitions is not to win them but to explore relationships and design. Of course one can hope to win but, particularly when it is an open competition – there were 687 entries for Beaubourg – to set out to win is in a sense self-defeating, because it will induce a conservative and tentative approach and the principal factor will be not to offend. With that in mind we approached Richard Rogers, who had just set up a joint partnership with Renzo Piano, and asked them if they would be willing to enter the competition with us. After some hesitation and indecision they decided to proceed.

The competition itself was a strange affair. Piano & Rogers had a clear idea of the building or image they wanted to explore – an idea stemming from Archigram, Cedric Price and Joan Littlewood, and the optimism of the 1960s. It was a large loose-fit frame where anything could happen. An information machine. At its core was the belief, which had been identified in the brief, that culture should not be élitist, that culture should be like any other form of information: open to all in a friendly, classless environment. Once the architectural idea, the large open steel framework, had started to gel, our job, in one page, was to design the framework.

‘Interchange’ by Archigram, the avant-garde group loosely based at the Architectural Association in the 1960s.

At first we sought literal solutions, large-span beams, giving clear space without columns. The result was lumpy, a frame which did not express our intentions at all. We decided instead to present an approach, one which would convey the spirit of our intentions even though the actual solution itself might be somewhat unreal. The structural frame, with large-span clear floors, was a simple problem structurally. It was easy to see how it could be realized. Therefore taking a different approach did not undermine belief in the project. Any engineer could look at it and say, ‘not very realistic, this is what they should be doing,’ and demonstrate the feasible solution.

Front elevation of the Pompidou Centre.

By emphasizing instead a range of unusual ideas which fitted the philosophy and intentions of the architecture, we wanted to fire the imagination. After all, we did not expect to win. Piano & Rogers were doing the Burrell competition. That was the one they wanted to win; we were working with the architect Robin Spence on the extension to the Houses of Parliament. That was serious. But Beaubourg was for exploring ideas, and to see whether there was an interest in working together between us at Structures 3 and Piano & Rogers. No compromise was needed. We did what we liked.

The solution was based on moveable floors. That produced a detailing challenge. The joint supporting the floor became the central element of the design. We devised a theoretical approach with a water-filled structure to give fire protection. Making the joint the essence of the solution expressed concisely the spirit we wanted to convey. Paris, after all, has many marvellous steel structures, from the Art Nouveau entrances of metro stations, to the great structures such as the Gare de Lyon, the Eiffel Tower or the Grand Palais. Often it is the expressiveness of the jointing which humanizes the structures and gives them their friendly feel. We were part of a noble tradition and said so.

Doing the competition was fun. It was all done quickly near the end, so there wasn’t any time for the fun to get lost. This is an important point about competitions, especially open ones. The entry must not become too deliberate or too detailed, or too closely argued a response to the brief, because the jury will only have the briefest of time with each entry. It is the idea they will see and the spirit of the drawings.

Peter Rice, Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers celebrating Renzo Piano’s RIBA Gold Medal Award, 1989.

It is history now, but we won. I know the date, 13 July 1971, because my wife was in hospital having given birth to our fourth child, Nemone, early the same morning. Thereafter everything changed. The change was slow at first, but eventually everything changed completely.

Beaubourg competition project elevation.

I am not sure why one so resists change, with all the possibilities it offers. In the days after the announcement everything was confused. We, the engineers – Ted Happold and I – were not the main stars: that was the role of the architects. But we had our role, we were part of the team, accepted, necessary, stars to be perhaps. It was very exciting. It was I suppose like winning a lottery, which in a way was what happened. Everyone wanted a part. Within Arups everyone was prepared to help. Someone would turn up in Paris just because they thought Ted or I had winked at them in the street on Tuesday.

Beaubourg competition model.

It took some time for reality to penetrate, and when it did it was daunting. In those first three months we had talked ourselves into a real role as engineers for the project. We had built Sydney Opera House after all, I was the living proof, and now we had to deliver. This was not how the French government had planned it should be. They foresaw French engineers and architects as the executive designers with the competition winners around to ensure that the intentions of the design were maintained. We argued that in a design like ours, it was all in the detailing. It was impossible to separate execution and intention. Robert Bordaz, the president of the client body, was convinced, demonstrating for the first (but not the last) time his wisdom and maturity in the face of many pressures.

The negotiations with the client and the authorities, with Ted Happold representing Arups, were complex and hard, and I did not have much part in them. I was slowly realizing the scale of the task we were so blithely insisting we could do.

Beaubourg competition drawing of structural system.

I did not speak French then. As I am Irish, my less than com-prehensive education had included Gaelic, Latin and ancient Greek, none of which was of much use in Paris in 1971. So we learned to smile instead. Perhaps it was just as well we did not speak the language. It is an advantage I have also noticed since, because we missed out on all the lectures and explanations directed at us by the great and the good. We just smiled at whatever people said and got on with the job of fulfilling our destiny. From time to time mem-bers of our own team who spoke French would interrupt the dream, and tell us how sceptical and unhappy the French officials were, how unreal they considered our presumption, particularly the British engineers’ presumption: ‘We have some great engineers in France you know …’ But we continued to smile and believe that somehow we were different.

Pompidou Centre cross-section.

As a condition of the competition, the team itself was installed in Paris with both engineers and architects. It was small, introspect-ive, isolated and also wonderfully ad hoc. None of us, with the exception of some members of the Piano & Rogers team, had really known each other before the adventure began. This meant that in the beginning there was some jockeying for position between the different team members, until a working relationship developed, all of which added to the air of unreality which permeated everything.

My own role in the project, and the relationship I built up with others, was dominated by the experience of Sydney Opera House. I had worked on that project for almost seven years. It was in its way the precursor of Beaubourg, a large international competition won out of the blue by an almost unknown architect. That too was a monument to culture, a symbol for a city. It was there that I had learned what little I knew about architecture. I did not know its architect, Jørn Utzon, very well, but I would follow him around the site and listen to him reasoning and explaining why he had made certain decisions. The dominant memory was of the importance of detail in determining scale, in deciding the way we see buildings. Sydney Opera House was a big building, designed to receive the public; it was carefully detailed, down to the joint between the tiles in the tile lids. This had been Utzon’s way of making the building soft and friendly. Beaubourg too was big, enormous really. It was going to require the same treatment, and the initial design decisions had to make that possible.

The essential engineering problem was becoming clear: a large, 44.8-metre span, carrying a heavy library, which could occur anywhere in the building. Future flexibility was a key philosophical component of the design. A height limit of 28 metres defined the level of the highest floor – 28 metres is the maximum escape height of a firefighter’s ladder. This latter factor was to avoid the building being classified as a ‘tall building’ by the fire authorities, as this would have meant many extra requirements for escape and fire protection undermining the whole concept. The other important requirement was that the structure had to extend from the front to the back of the building and this included the two movement zones at the front and the back. On the piazza side, the front, it was for the movement of people, and on the rue de Renard side this was for the services: the air ducts, cabling, plumbing, service lifts and all the other paraphernalia that a modern building needs.

Spaceframe structure for the 1970 Osaka World Fair, showing the cast-steel nodes.

Shortly after we had won the competition I made a trip to Japan to deliver a paper at a conference on tension structures. As part of that conference, trips were organized to Osaka to see the surviving structures of the 1970 World Fair. One of these structures was a giant space frame designed by Kenzo Tange and Professor Tsuboi, the eminent Japanese engineer. There I saw large cast-steel nodes.

An idea was born. I had been wondering for some time what it was that gave the large engineering structures of the nineteenth century their special appeal. It was not just their daring and confidence. That is present in many of today’s great structural achievements, but they lack the warmth, the individuality and personality of their nineteenth-century counterparts. One element I had latched on to was the evidence of the attachment and care their designers and makers had lavished on them. Like Gothic cathedrals, they exude craft and individual choice. The cast-iron decorations and the cast joints give each of these structures a quality unique to their designer and maker, a reminder that they were made and conceived by people who had laboured and left their mark.

Cast-iron beams supporting brick vaults. Basement of warehouse at Albert Dock, Liverpool (now the Maritime Museum), 1848–51. Engineer Jesse Hartley.

Cast steel could have this quality too. Cast steel had the possibility of achieving the same personal contact. But it had been abandoned as a building material since those same Victorian times. The need for reliability and predictability had effectively eliminated all those materials not produced by a standard industrial process where the absence of flaws was a proven outcome of the process itself. But here it was being used in a major structure. I decided Beaubourg would be designed using cast steel as its core material.

Cast-iron aqueduct over disused railway near Linlithgow, Scotland (late 1830s). Designed and constructed by engineers of the Slammannan Railway.

At this stage it is worth explaining more clearly the full logic which led to the choice of cast steel throughout the main structure of Beaubourg. Steel structures in buildings are usually made from standard steel sections, I-sections, channel sections, tubes and angles. These are produced by rolling and by extrusion in continu-ous lines which guarantee their quality. They also guarantee a visual and geometrical uniformity which leaves very little room for personal expression. In addition, everyone has a preconceived idea of steel structures made from factory-produced standard elements. Surprise and personality are missing, particularly for the general public, and with it all the feeling of contact and warmth between the person looking and the maker, whether designer or fabricator. The introduction of cast steel seemed a way to break this deadlock; a way to create out of the Centre Beaubourg structure something which, by its element of surprise and unpredictability, by the unusual conjunction of castings among the more common steel elements, would make the structure part of an approachable and sympathetic building. The scale of the Centre Beaubourg would be the scale of the pieces rather than the scale of the whole.

Of course there are many other more important facets to the building and its architecture. The movement of people on the piazza façade, the piazza itself, the large clear floor plans, are all part of the same intense effort to make the place a people place, where individuals can find themselves at one with this enormous monument. It was, after all, one of the express aims of the competition and of the solution offered by Piano & Rogers, to create a popular palace of culture, one in which ordinary people would not feel intimidated.

This sense of intimidation by culture was one with which I had a clear personal affinity. Coming from rural Ireland, where the only culture was a fœtid freedom of sound in language, by way of the technical departments of an austere Protestant university, places like the Louvre and the National Gallery in London overwhelmed me. The language of culture, alien and rigid and presumptive, was a barrier in itself. I really wanted to make the Centre Beaubourg an accessible place, a place, like the Sydney Opera House or the Eif-fel Tower, where you could feel good, not afraid and over-humble.

Cast steel was the way to go. It became my contribution, a mission. I was, I felt, the most ordinary person there. I was determined to do my bit. Little did the bureaucracy know, or the industry which later on decided that this fixation with using cast steel was silly, out of place in the modern era of 1971, that they were dealing with an engineer obsessed. Engineers are sensible people, after all, not like architects or other artistic types. They are prone to making decisions by rational argument, as they are people with pragmatic values, people who have seen the light.

The decision to use cast steel was taken before we had a struc-ture. It was made, too, before we knew whether we could make it work, before we knew anything really about how to design in cast steel. Three separate sets of work got going all together.

Lennart Grut, Ted Happold and Peter Rice, part of the Beaubourg team.

It is important at this stage to talk of teamwork. Teamwork is a much misused word, often used as a cover for blandness, or as a salute to others by someone claiming the credit and identity for some important artefact. Good teams are made up of different people, people whose separateness and attitude complement each other, and who by their individual willingness to work together and accept the presence and contribution of all of the others, for a while at least, make possible real momentum. Apart from Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, the team working out the structure at this incep-tion stage was made up of other key architects such as Laurie Abbott – another singular and dedicated nutcase, like me – a great draughtsman who could draw and make real the ideas I could only talk about, and three engineers: Lennart Grut, the man who controlled and did the work; Johnny Stanton, young, aged twenty plus, talented and at ease; and Andrew Dekany, an engineer of the old school, an engineer as engineers ought to be. Beyond and above all this in London were Ted Happold, Povl Ahm and the rest of the Arup hierarchy, negotiating and creating the space for the team to get to work.

The Arup back-up had a critical role. Working in Paris, we could have ideas and research and demonstrate how they worked. But, in engineering, structures must be correct. They must not fail. When innovating, which using cast steel in this way was, it is essential to have detailed and thorough analysis facilities available from highly skilled people with no emotional commitment to making the solutions work, just a clear, logical and objective insistence that the structure and its materials satisfy all the laws and requirements they should. Sydney had taught me how to use Arup and its gifted individuals. Beaubourg was the proof that it worked.

This use of the talent of the many highly skilled Arup engineers has been central to everything I have done, and my work would have been much poorer and much less adventurous without it. Two exceptional individuals, among many others I have relied upon throughout this long period, stand out: John Blanchard, the most gifted analyst I know, and Turlogh O’Brien, a materials scientist whose understanding of materials is second to none.

Gerber bridge over the Main at Hassfurt, 1866–67. The oldest metal cantilever bridge in the world, made up of three spans of 87, 140 and 87 feet.

We quickly realized that the task ahead was not as simple as ringing up the Japanese and asking them the way. The clearest, if most intractable task was to find the right structure. The essence of the problem was that the architecture demanded a clear span of 44.8 metres, with movement zones on the front and back, which brought the whole structure up to 56.8 metres. The structure had to enclose all three zones. An additional complication was that the real internal space was only the main span – the movement zones were outside the façade – so a natural point had to be created where the façade would naturally go. It was no good making a fantastic solution, spanning the main space, with little outriggers to keep the moving people and ducts in. We tried of course to do it that way. It got no marks from the architects. We also tried double columns on either side, with the main beams spanning from half way between them. This got no marks either; indeed it might have registered a negative score.

Structural principle of a Gerber bridge.A Bridge of single spans: easy to erect, but uneconomic structural depth.B Continuous beam at bridge: difficult to erect, but economic structural depth.C Gerber’s solution: easy to erect and economic structural depth.

Then one of the team, I am no longer sure who, probably Lennart Grut – I know it was not me – suggested a suspended beam on a short propped cantilever, the so-called gerberette solution named after Heinrich Gerber, a nineteenth-century German engineer who invented this structural system for bridges. This solution simply and elegantly resolved all the conflicts. Naturally it was quickly adopted. From here the next step was to design the elements – the column, the tie, the gerberette and the beam. The key to the whole was the gerberette. After all, a column is a column: a hollow round pole to carry load. And a tie is easily found; it became a solid round bar. No, the gerberette was the thing and then the beam. Again the struggle for a good idea ensued. A casting it had to be, but what kind, what shape should it take? The winning idea was supplied by Johnny Stanton, with help, if memory serves me right, from Lau-rie Abbott: a single piece, going from the tie past the column on either side to pick up the beam.

Double boom beam connects to gerberette, which is pinned to column.

Cross-section diagram showing relationship between beam, gerberette and column.

From here on the real design of the gerberette began. That took months. We had to make something that could be cast. Visits to experts, visits to foundries helped us understand how it should be done. The forces and loads in the piece – I like the word piece, it makes me feel like an artist when I use it – were the principal determinants of its shape: slender at the tension tie end where the load is applied, deep and strong over the column where the load and moment reach a maximum, and slender again at the point of pick up of the beam. The development of form and the interactive nature of the design were complex at this stage. Certain decisions could only be taken by the engineers. The material quality and the nature of the stresses in the element had to be equated to the load cast steel could carry. Engineering responsibility in this situation is very clear. The structure must not fail. It must work, and continue to work under all conditions of load. It may look elegant or it may not, it may reflect the inherent nature of cast steel or the material of which it is made, and that is very satisfying if it is possible but if not you compromise a little. But it must carry the load.

Gerberette plan, longitudinal section and cross-sections showing articulation of cast steel.

Cast steel was a poorly understood material. It was principally produced by foundries dating from the mid-nineteenth century, especially in Europe in the heartland of the old industrial infra-structure. Their methods and approach were craft-based, and had not much changed since the end of the nineteenth century. To this tradition had to be added the requirements of modern testing for reliability and predictability. A new technology was emerging at this time, spawned by the need for reliable steel jackets for nuclear reactors and by the complexity of making oil platforms for the cold and deep North Sea. It was called ‘fracture mechanics’, the science of predicting the behaviour of metals under strain, and how they would react if small flaws and cracks existed within them. It seemed the answer. We worked with the welding institutes in both France and the UK to develop a way of transferring this technology to predicting the behaviour of the gerberette, and defining what the material had to be. The final shape of the gerberette, carefully drawn, modelled and redrawn by the architects many times, reflected all these needs.

Workmen installing a spherical bearing.

Gradually, as we worked, a philosophy for what we were doing emerged. The piece began to absorb in a very visible way what was happening. Its shape was almost a structural diagram of the forces within it. The needs of casting were shown by the thicknesses of the top and bottom. The shapes of the openings at the top and sides were produced by the erection sequence. Large spherical bearings were introduced at the point of support of the beam and at the point where the gerberette sits on the axle through the column to make the column work properly. All these things are visible. It had become an essay on how it works. All points of contact between the gerberette and other elements were machined. This had the unintended but very important advantage of controlling the way any future user could attach elements to the casting. Future flexi-bility could be controlled. The more you know, the better you can read and the more you can see. All the information is there, and the gerberette is consistent with the nature of cast steel as well as being a shape whose form is a direct result of the forces acting on it. And yet it is quite personal, to whom exactly I am not too sure, uniquely a product of that group of people working on its development, our team. And although manufactured by industry, it is not a hard impersonal industrial product but one where human intervention is very evident.

Construction shot of assembly.

The essence of the design given by the use of cast steel was that each piece was separate, an articulated assembly where the members only touched at discrete points. As in music, where the space between the notes defines the quality, here it was the space between the pieces which defined the scale.

The design having been chosen, work proceeded to draw and define the whole of the steel structure so that it could be tendered. This work was done in an atmosphere of considerable scepticism. This scepticism came from the different French parts of the team, from the client and from all the different advisors, mainly French industry and expert advisors, though not the people from the French welding institute, the Institut de Soudure. Basically the sceptics could not understand our motivation, or the logic of our position. ‘What do you want?’ they said. ‘You want it to look like that – OK, we can make it to look that way by traditional methods, just leave it to us.’ Implied was: ‘You’re too young. The world is not that simple. Just let the people who know get on with it.’ We, for our part, ignored all the talk. Even when we understood, we smiled and worked on.

The other elements of the design, the beam, the centrifugally cast columns and the ties, which were radical in themselves, paled in comparison to the gerberette. The gerberette was the symbol of our daring, the core of our attention.

The groups that were to participate in the tender were assembled and the project proceeded as normal, or almost normal. The client and president of the project agency, in the person of Robert Bordaz, showed enormous sangfroid in the face of all the doubt and scepticism. He effectively protected us from the real criticism and never once asked us to stop. This was extraordinary considering the difference between the credentials of the protagonists: on the one hand all the senior figures of French industry who would have to build the project and be responsible thereafter, and on the other us, a group of young foreigners, almost without a track record. Admittedly we had won the competition to be allowed to design the Centre, but even here the scenario was not going exactly as the client had scripted it. In the original screenplay the client would hold the competition, a winner would be selected who, if from overseas, would be married to competent French professionals who would effectively execute it. And indeed, after tiring through the experi-ence of Beaubourg the French government has ensured that in all subsequent competitions that is how it happens. Not only was there this scepticism in French industry, there was also considerable opposition from French professionals at the slight implied by the fact that they were excluded from the most important job to be built in France since the war. But the client resisted it all, and gave us the space and time to carry out our own design.

It is interesting to reflect on what being a foreigner means in this kind of situation. Not only did we not understand properly the level of disquiet opposite us, we were also unaware of the undercurrent of rumour and doubt prevalent in the society at the time, both about the project and about us. At home, all this would have been an ever-present factor and would undoubtedly have dampened our ardour and sapped our confidence, and maybe eventually forced us to change.

During the tender period we presented the project to Socotec, the bureau de contrôle, or checking authority. It was not impressed. Almost everything was wrong. Like a boxer getting up after a count of eight we steadied ourselves and tried to understand and itemize the comments. There were so many that even this was almost impossible. Many were complex and very negative and we con-cluded that the bureau had no belief that the project would be built. Unlike us, its members could hear the undercurrent of criticism. We proceeded nevertheless to tackle the items one by one, and with the help of Robert Bordaz we started to achieve a breakthrough. By the end the intervention of Socotec was very positive. M. Daussy, the chief engineer of Socotec, suggested we load-test all the principal elements to guarantee their integrity. This was without doubt the most intelligent solution and one which proved a godsend when fabrication started.

The tender itself proceeded without incident until the results arrived. Then all the non-French contractors withdrew and the two main French companies combined to offer a single price, at 50 per cent over budget, and also put forward an alternative structural solution which mysteriously cost exactly what we could afford. All hell broke loose. The client declared the tender null and void and instructed us to negotiate with the lowest bidder, while exhorting us to search for alternative companies worldwide who could build our scheme. They were sceptical and I think believed that a nego-tiated compromise would be the probable answer. GTM, the main contractor, suggested a concrete alternative, to indicate to the steel industry that it would not have it all its own way. And we got through contacts two positive responses, one from Nippon Steel in Japan and one from Krupp in Germany, who were upset that they had been effectively excluded the first time around.

The day the Nippon Steel telex arrived the air began to clear. Yes, it said, it was all possible, and it could be delivered free-on-board at Le Havre at five francs a kilo, a price exactly half our budget. Slowly belief returned. And we began to see real progress in our negotiations with the French contractors. Krupp too sent an accept-able offer. We were on our way.