Friends,
If you visit The City with some regularity, you may have noticed that there’s a new woman in town. The installation of Marco Cochrane’s R-EVOLUTION at Embarcadero Plaza caused a bit of heartburn amongst a subset of San Francisco’s “cognoscenti” because of reasons, but I’ve always figured that the more controversial a piece is, the more I feel the need to check it out. If you ‘ve been downtown recently but haven’t noticed it, you’re probably not alone; for the scale of the piece, it’s actually quite transparent on a clear day. But you should definitely check it out before the exhibition ends this month, and even if you have, you might consider going back for another look, perhaps before or after a chat with yours truly – more on that later in our newsletter.
Like most large format art, I’m sure it was Cochrane’s intention for us to view the piece from a distance, taking in the figure amidst the cityscape and backlit by the sky. But I’d encourage you all to get waaay closer, all the way up to the edge of the plinth and then awkwardly crane your neck in a bit. Check out the legs. The INSIDE of the legs. Look at that space frame hidden within the metal skin, which required a reported 55,000 welds. Did Marco Cochrane do any calculations to prove out the design? You can ask him at our
October Association Meeting. But who cares? The structure is light, it is transparent, it keeps the massive sculpture up while maintaining the artistic vision for the piece. In a sense, it’s our profession/craft as its best self.
Those lightweight built-up members are reminiscent of landmark structures like Gustav Eiffel’s Tower, Othmar Ammann’s George Washington Bridge, or Buckminster Fuller’s Expo 67 Pavillion, legendary structures engineered to be as efficient as possible in an earlier age when labor was cheap and steel was a precious resource. These days, that value proposition is usually flipped, making opportunities to optimize the bejeezus out of a structure unfortunately rare outside of something like civic art, when bringing the project to life is more a labor of love or passion than a business enterprise.
When I first decided to pursue structural engineering as a career, it was with the mission of making beautiful architecture come to life. Sadly, my own architectural vision wasn’t evolving much beyond two-bit (or maybe 8- or 16-bit; pick your analogy depending on which generation you identify with) imitations of the Frank Lloyd Wright homes I used to give tours of back in high school, but I did have a knack for physics, so I figured I’d just give up my “leading man” pursuits and aim for a solid “supporting actor” sort of prize. More Steve Buscemi than Leonardo DiCaprio. It would help me pay the bills until I inevitably landed my dream job in radio, doing play-by-play for the Chicago Blackhawks or DJing for WXRT. Ever the pragmatist, this guy.
Shortly after moving to SF, the Great Recession put a bit of a damper on those cool Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid projects I imagined myself working on. I still got to work on some large-scale projects, though, some that have been built and many that exist today only as renderings. The structures themselves were fun to work on, but I was surprised by the level of creative satisfaction I found in small areas of projects: the pushover analysis I did for a precarious-looking sculpture, learning to design with multi-laminate glass for a custom dining room, figuring out how to design a bollard for a charging rhino, or the curving stair that had me cracking open some musty tomes on stability theory to feel confident that my design would look lithe enough while preventing those climbing it from losing their lunch.
It was on that last project that I was working with a steel fabricator who informed me that, after he installed my stair, he was taking a couple weeks off to attend Burning Man, where he’d be installing some much more impressive structures. It was the first time I heard that people did anything other than trip, dance, and get their cars filthy at Burning Man. This square and heat-intolerant guy’s interest was piqued and a few years later I found myself in a silly hat, goggles, and random patches of sunburn pedaling my way-too-nice-to-bring-to-Black Rock City bicycle around the Playa to every single piece of art there was. As a structural engineer, Greg Fleishman’s Temple of Whollyness, constructed without nails so that it would burn cleanly, was a favorite of mine, as was an incredible, 55-foot tall, nearly transparent statue of a woman reaching for the sky by an artist named Marco Cochrane (you can check out Truth is Beauty at her permanent home near the San Leandro BART Station). It was an inspiring experience, and a couple years into my excursion into Forensics I found myself really missing design for the first time and the role I had, however however “supporting” it might be, in bringing people those sorts of moments of beauty and joy.
Not all of us will get a chance to be the engineering mind behind pieces of art or architecture like those, but don’t let that keep you from seizing the opportunities to make beauty and joy happen that might be right in front of you every day. Anyone who’s been doing design for awhile will tell you that the most memorable or unexpectedly time-consuming parts of a project are often not the design or complex analysis of the main structure. It’s that feature stair, that roof terrace, that foyer artwork or water feature, or that [expletive deleted] port cochere. These are those special areas where our architect friends get to let their creative side show on otherwise utilitarian and prescriptive projects, where they get a chance to be their best selves and bring the user a moment of joy when they enter the building. Resist the temptation to roll your eyes at them. Roll up your sleeves instead and be YOUR best self. Are you gonna lose some money or sleep over it? Probably, but you just might gain one of those memorable experiences that you complain, fondly, about to your friends over a drink at the next SEAONC meeting.
With Joy,
David Ojala
dojala@thorntontomasetti.com