Features editor
In a roundabout way via the Olympic Park and the Science Museum, Lord Byron’s baleful poetic influence might prove that engineering is the ultimate creative endeavour
A mildly disgruntled engineer — is there any other kind? — once told me that there was a group of civil engineers in the UK who enjoy unparalleled public goodwill, a high profile and handsome salaries, who are feted in society and even raised to the House of Lords without comment. ‘Of course, they have the good sense not to call themselves engineers,’ he said. ‘They call themselves architects.’
Now, we could argue for years over whether architecture is a branch of engineering. It’s an issue we’ve tackled in this journal, asking the question, who built France’s soaring bridge in the clouds, the Millau Viaduct? Was it Lord Norman Foster, whose name is most often attached to the project, or its impish chief engineer, the less well-known (to the public at least) Michel Virlogeaux?

Elsewhere in the journal, I looked at the Aquatic Centre at London’s Olympic Park, nominated for this year’s Stirling Prize, and the structural engineering that was needed to realise the designs of the architect, Zaha Hadid, after they’d been adapted from a competition entry to a pared-down, cost-controlled version required by straitened economic circumstances. It was a significant challenge to support the soaring winged roof with its dramatic parabolic curves.
Hadid is, however, one of the most engineering-aligned architects. Trained as a mathematician, her work exemplifies one of my favourite descriptions of architecture — ‘frozen mathematics’. Indeed, her current project is to design the mathematics gallery at London’s Science Museum, whose centrepiece will be a solid representation of the air vortices which form around the wings of a vintage aircraft designed to fly at low velocity.

As an example of the creative possibilities of STEM subjects, Hadid (and other architects who work at a heroic scale) is hard to beat. But a recent event at the Royal Academy of Engineering asked whether engineering should be removed altogether from the STEM acronym, as it downplays the creative aspect of the discipline; something which, it is argued, dissuades many people, notably women and girls, from considering it as a career.
Which is extremely patronising, in my opinion. And if readers will permit another digression in a piece which has already digressed quite a bit (I am conscious of my tendencies as a writer, you see) it downplays the contribution of the figure many claim as the queen of STEM and the figurehead of women in the field, Ada Lovelace, who was honoured yesterday in a day which bears her name.
Ada, the daughter of Lord Byron (although she never knew him), is remembered as the first ever computer programmer, suggesting that Charles Babbage’s proposed mechanical calculating machine, the Analytical Engine, could be used to calculate Bernoulli numbers, a sequence derived from a complex equation involving reciprocals, powers and exponentials.

Ada’s work, published as a series of notes to her translation of an Italian army engineer’s writing about Babbage’s work, could only be a thought experiment: the Analytical Engine, a development of the earlier and more famous Difference Engine with separate processing and memory units, was never actually built because the notoriously prickly and obsessive Babbage insisted on learning watchmaking and machining skills himself and ran out of money, time and life.
So Ada’s feat of inventing the concept of computer programming could only have been one of pure creativity. Nobody had done it before or even could have; there was no precedent even for the frame of reference. So although it was underpinned by her deep knowledge of mathematics — in which she’d been trained at the insistence of her mother, to rid her of her father’s ‘unhealthy’ poetic outlook — the act that raised her to STEM immortality was one of pure creativity (and maybe proof that you can’t extinguish poetry, you can just divert it). Bringing my digression full circle (I don’t ramble completely aimlessly), one could say much the same about Zaha Hadid’s designs; and if you visit her new gallery at the Science Museum, be sure to go downstairs and look at the reconstruction of the Difference Engine.

So to say that the E should be taken out of STEM because it isn’t creative enough is to misunderstand the history and the whole basis of engineering. It’s inherently creative; using a knowledge of physical science and its mathematical underpinning to create solutions to problems, new concepts, and solid reality that can span a gorge above the clouds or create a building you can go swimming in. As to whether architecture is engineering, I think that varies from architect to architect, but it’s certainly a cause of engineering and one of the most important ways that engineering becomes visible and exerts its influence on the world.
To conclude this mass of digression, if STEM doesn’t seem creative, it’s not an inherent fault in the subject. It’s the fault of whoever’s explaining it.
When I visited the exhibition next to the Millau Viaduct a few years ago I noticed that the emphasis was very much on the engineering, with scarcely a mention of the architect. It would be nice to think that it was because of the high regard for engineers in France, but I suppose there could be another reason.
This article reminded me of an article on the Creative industries By James Heartfield –
http://www.heartfield.org/Creativity_Gap.pdf (2003)
– covering the rise of the Creative Industries around the formation of the DCMS – well worth reading to see where this obsession with ‘Creativity’ has come from including that of the Engineering leadership. He points out ‘Today, it argued, everybody wants to play up the creative element in their job, and nobody wants to do the humdrum stuff’.
I think that this is the rub – whilst design and parts of engineering are clearly creative – a lot of it is not. We are not doing any favours to the disciplines by appealing to the narcissism of youth by pretending it always is (with an eye on getting the ear of an equally ‘creativity obsessed’ govt). I think we should become grown up about this. Heartfield goes on to point out.
“In different ages people worked to different values. In rural communities they
worked out of duty, while industrial workers imagined they were in a heroic test of
manly endurance and skill”
I would not suggest we go back to that past and I don’t have a full answer– but let’s try to be really creative – by working out what are the “non creative’ but ‘different VALUES (the Soul?) that make engineering distinctive – rather than pretending we are cool Shoreditch/Hoxton cats impressing each other at a party. Heroic – a quality that may – might be worth aiming for a start.
Great article, esepcially the last part – ‘if STEM doesn’t seem creative, it’s not an inherent fault in the subject. It’s the fault of whoever’s explaining it.’
Couldn’t agree more.
Coincidentally Stuart, certainly you’ll be pleased to read:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hilbert
“Good, he did not have enough imagination to become a mathematician”.
—Hilbert’s response upon hearing that one of his students had dropped out to study poetry.
To digress from the digression, I find architects going super creative, which, in my mind is not such a good thing.
Going with “wild” designs results in:
1- Glorigying the architect
2- Will look obsolete in 10 years, or whenever fashions change
How many of those structures built in London in the last 10 years will really look really good 10 years from now? Or, as good as structures built 300 yrs ago?
This is not to deride modern technology, but to point to excesses in stylishness
Bad idea: to remove E from STEM. Even worse idea: to justify it so that we, the ultra-sensible women, who have two right brain hemispheres and no left (another myth debunked by neuroscience: the split in the human brain between creativity and reasoning), can be attracted indirectly to building all that creative stuff.
There is a good idea already in place, just add A:
http://stemtosteam.org/
Thank you, Nathan, for a great article and beautiful homage to Ada Lovelace. And to Babbage too, they were both creative engineers. “The Philosphical Breakfast Club” by Laura Snyder is a great read about their time and extraordinary work.
I agree with the comment about many architectural works being vanity projects for excessive costs. Too many of them are also badly engineered and require constant repair (which the creative types never project). Yes, somebody has to do the less exciting work, as Paul mentioned. It cannot work any other way, somebody has to make an idea (preferably a good one) real and then maintain it for a very long time.
‘Anonymous’ asks “How many of those structures built in London in the last 10 years will really look really good 10 years from now?”
However this is precisely the issue – the reality is that nobody knows!
Unless ‘creatives’ and ‘vanities’ wrestle these projects into existence through personal obsession and drive there will no alternative to the bland. Democracy does not encourage true greatness.
Greatness is almost inevitably characterised by attendant failures. Unfortunately commercial realities do not encourage failure, and generally bland conservatism is the result, and is the real failure.
We must not discourage individuality and experimentation, but need to plan and be prepared for some to ‘fail’ (whatever that means). Only then will we get true greatness.
Whatever the field, you need to kiss a lot of frogs to find your prince!!
‘They call themselves architects.’ The original designation of that word was ‘arch technician’ -ie those stone-masons, sufficiently skilled who could build arches which, when loaded from above (with more arches, towers and roofs) did not fall down! In Medieval times, they were the builders of the great temples, cathedrals, palaces and parliaments: and those who were ‘free-masons’ were literally self-employed and did not ‘belong’ to/were not employed directly by the Church or State. The school I attended for 14 years was funded/supported by the free-masons: the grace before meals I listened to for 3 (meals per day)x40 (number of weeks in school year) x7(days in week) x 14 (years at the school) ie: =12,000 ish times starts “May the Great Architect of the Universe give us thankful hearts…
Actually the detail design of the Olympic Aquatic Centre (whilst under the overall direction of the Iraqi lady) was actually done by Mr Glenn Moorley [I know this because , after his life-style change and leaving London, he opened a coffee shop in East Devon, in a building that belongs to my family!]