ENGITECT
Issue
Five - Winter 1999
Introduction
Welcome to the fifth edition of Engitect.
Regular readers will recall that the last issue, back in March,
celebrated our 90th year in practice. This was marked
by a reception held in the Great Hall of the Institution of
Civil Engineers in Great George Street, Westminster. Nearly
300 clients and friends attended the event and we were honoured
that Sir Stuart Hampson, Chairman of the John Lewis Partnership,
agreed to say a few words.
Sir Stuart spoke of our work for The
John Lewis Partnership over the last seventy years. He
recalled a passage in a letter written in 1942 by Spedan
Lewis to our founding partner's widow describing Bertram Hurst
as his 'Engineer for Strength', which is an interesting way
of describing a structural engineer!
In view of the historical theme of our
last newsletter we have endeavoured to review current projects
in this edition.
Waitrose Surbiton
The days when members of the design team
can leave parts of a building unresolved, on the basis that
'the contractor will not be working in that area for some time',
are fast disappearing, particularly for steel framed buildings.
Waitrose Surbiton is a building fully framed
in structural steel where a full package of design information
was passed to the steel fabricator. This new development
comprises a supermarket with a 1917m2 (20,630sq ft)
sales floor suspended over a six metre deep basement.
The basement accommodates warehouse storage including an unloading
bay for heavy goods vehicles and is reached via a ramp down
from street level. There is a 15 metre diameter turntable
at basement level to assist the heavy goods vehicle movements.
Staff accommodation is provided in a two-storey
block over part of the sales floor with mechanical plant housed
in a three-storey area to the rear. The roof spans over
the column-free sales floor are up to 37 metres. Spans
of up to 25 metres are needed where the sales floor is above
the basement and loading bay.
Over the last 12 years and in recognition
of the need to improve the competitiveness of the European constructional
steelwork industry, the steel industry, including suppliers
and fabricators, has developed a process known as CIMsteel (computer
integrated manufacturing in constructional steelwork).
The concept involves the introduction of techniques similar
to those adopted in manufacturing industries such as automobile
and aerospace.
A construction project is a large and complex
one-off product which is not easily broken down into component
parts that can be repeated on other projects as is the practice
in the manufacturing industries.
The steel industry has carried out much
research into items that can be repeated, such as end connections,
and the process has developed to the extent where many steel
fabricators offer computer software drawing packages, which
have a dedicated link to a computerised manufacturing operation.
The process involves the creation of a three dimensional computer
generated model of the steel frame. The individual element
assemblies are then generated using a library of standard details
adn the project specific requirements such as connection loads
etc. The erection sequence is then established and after
comment has been made on the details by the design team the
data is down-loaded into the computerised manufacturing shop
and fabrication commences.
The implications for the design team of
such a process are far reaching. One obvious requirement
is that the dimensional requirements of the full steel frame
must be established before the computer model can be finalised.
Any subsequent changes, even minor dimensional alterations,
risk disrupting the manufacturing process. Thus the task
imposed upon the design team is exacting. At the moment
most fabricators develop the computer model from two-dimensional
drawings. We are now looking at being able to provide
the fabricator with three dimensional drawings
The development team included Waitrose Architects
supported by DMWR, Hurst Peirce & Malcolm as structural
engineers, quantity surveyors E C Harris, main contractor Wates
and steel fabricator Quantrills.
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James Graham Malcolm 1928-1999
 James
Graham Malcolm, who died on the 5th of July, which was his 71st
birthday, and who was known to all of us as Jimmy, was the son
of my senior partner at Hurst, Peirce & Malcolm and I had
known him for almost the whole of his life.
Jimmy went to Merchant Taylors' School
where he did well in the academic field and also became a keen
sportsman; the love of sport and particularly cricket and rugby
then formed was to continue for the rest of his life.
He was a member of the MCC and regularly attended Lords as well
as Twickenham; I am sure many people will remember with considerable
pleasure being amongst his guests on these occasions.
I am not knowledgeable in these matters
and my wedding was unwittingly arranged on the day of an important
fixture at Twickenham; I well remember his wry and somewhat
pithy coments on having to miss Twickenham that day - it took
me several years to live that down!
Jimmy at an early age chose to follow
in his father's footsteps as a civil and structural engineer.
After National Service in The Army he
worked on the design and construction of Clifton Bridge in Nottingham.
He continued to work on bridges and was Deputy Resident Engineer
on the building of Nasiriyah bridge in Iraq.
We engineers, as the years go by, get
used to seeing our early efforts demolished. However Jimmy
saw this with a vengeance on television when the RAF bombed
and blew up his Nasiriyah bridge during the Gulf War.
Jimmy had a taste of the work of Hurst
Peirce & Malcolm when he worked as a junior member of staff
for a short while in the early 1950s, and liking it he was happy
to return in 1963 when he became a partner. He was to
remain a partner for the next 29 years including a four-year
stint as senior partner.
 During
that long time he became expert in many branches of our work
and his advice was eagerly sought, not only for the normal construction
and troubleshooting work of an engineer, but in particular on
strong rooms and security work, explosion resistance and bomb
damage; also bell towers and the hanging of peals of bells became
his speciality. The bell frames for the new ring of bells
in Washington Cathedral I know gave him particular satisfaction
He was a most sagacious man who had a
way of listening to a problem, going rather quiet for a few
moments and then responding with a brilliant and succinct solution
- or perhaps suggesting an absolutely crushing rejoinder.
I will miss those discussions we used
to have on technical and all sorts of other matters, which I
very much valued. He had a marvellous; way of discarding
irrelevancies and cutting through to the heart of a problem;
even though he could sometimes be a little intolerant of others
and perhaps a touch irascible, but all that he did he did in
the most gentlemanly way. He had the ability to make occasions
special.
Jimmy was closely involved with the Star
& Garter Home at Richmond where he was a Governor for several
years, and he also served as a Governor of Bickley Park School.
I am sure his wise counsel in these activities as well as in
many other connections will be long remembered.
He was a family man and enjoyed the company
of young people to whom he was a kind and generous mentor.
He will be sorely missed by all who knew him and in particular
by Adam, Sarah and the Children, as well as by his wife Margaret.
Michael Hurst, July 1999
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CDM And All That
 Regular
readers will recall the picture of a recently cast reinforced
wall in Crete with Wellngton boots jutting from it. We
invited readers to submit captions for a conversation between
the site agent and formwork foreman and were pleased to receive
a number of entries including the following:-
'Was the foldaway bed your idea?'
Richard Thelwell
'Giovanni, when I said 'give him concrete
boots' I meant get rid of the whole body, you know, in foundations
or something. How the hell are we going to explain this
to the boss?'
Michael Ney
However, the judges decided that the entry:
'Michael Hurst has hung up his boots at last'
by Michael Hurst was the most appropriate.
For those readers who do not know us very
well, Michael joined the practice in 1959 and was Senior Partner
from 1969-1987 and attended the office as our Consultant until
March of this year when he retired from all consultancy work.
Perhaps you would like to put your mind
to the next caption competition. This view was recently
taken somewhere in central London by Lawrance Hurst on a party
wall job.
What might Lawrance's instructing Surveyor
have said upon encountering this reinforcement in the wall's
footing?
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Your Feedback
 The
back page article of our last issue, which showed a soil pipe
beneath a domestic residence terminated abruptly against a mass
of solid rock, prompted a number of comments from our readers.
We received this from Michael Ney:-
"Turning to the back page, this sort
of scamped work, is regrettably, not just in the past.
I have been involved in a public building, recently refurbished.
We found that the main, fan-assisted flue from the Stelrad Modular
boilers was of stainless steel at the bottom, stainless steel
at the top and reportedly of stainless steel up the builders'
work shaft.
After complaints of headaches, 'gassy smells'
and nausea from occupants of a public assembly area, we dropped
a CCTV drain camera down the flue. We found the middle
section was of galvanised steel that had rotted away in the
aggressive flue gas. Products of combustion were being
pumped up the brick shaft by the flue dilution fan and were
seeping through cracks in the old brickwork structure under
the increased pressure.
The clerk of works, for there was an M &
E one and a B & CE one, had been duped into thinking that
the whole of the flue was of stainless steel and properly installed.
With a proper stainless steel flue now installed in the whole
length, the complaints have gone completely.
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Partnership News
We announce two retirements from the firm
since our last edition. John Levy retires at the end of
the year and Peter Bucher who retired in October have been with
us for twelve years and eighteen months respectively.
Before joining us, both had long careers in Building Control,
John as Deputy District Surveyor in Greenwich then Senior Assistant
District Surveyor in Islington and Woolwich and Peter who worked
in Chelsea. Their knowledge of the Building Regulations
has been widely appreciated by our clients when checking licenses
and alterations for a number of major estates in London, including
the Crown Commissioners and the Grosvenor Estates. All
the staff here wish them both long and happy retirements.
(P.S. - all rumours that they are being
replaced because they are not Millennium compliant are completely
unfounded.)
We would like to welcome Andrew Wan who
joins us straight from Heriot Watt University as graduate engineer
and also Yan Naung who joins us from Kvaerner on a years job
exchange.
In return Michael Chung has joined Kvaerner
to gain some valuable site experience.
And finally we would like to congratulate
Phil Hurst and his wife Hilary on becoming parents for the first
time. Oliver Hurst was born on 14th April 1999 and all
are doing well, especially Phil who has also recently been made
an associate of the practice.
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And Finally...
A further entry in our series from the
19th Century building practices and hazards to health, here
is one that readers may relate to, particularly given the current
vogue for garden make-overs.
The article is taken from 'The Complete
Builder by J. F. Sullivan published in 1880. Things are
better now, aren't they? Answers on a postcard to the
editor please.
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