ScottishArchitecture.com

There is an inherent beauty in machines, partly because they take on life in a way that buildings never can.  Mechanisms are really just tools created by us to overcome the challenges of the world – terrain, gravity, weather – and you could look on them as our puny attempts to impose order on a disorderly universe. 

As a child of Meccano and Lego, I was always interested in making mechanical things.   Sometimes the parts came in kit form, sometimes I rummaged through my father’s crates of "scrap iron".  I probably still have the small cast iron pulley blocks, and angle irons which once formed a small jib of a wee crane.  At some point I also had a single-cylinder Villiers engine earmarked as a prime mover (it sat in an old Ransomes “Typhoon” mower), and 56lb. lumps of pig iron set aside as a counterweight.  Making scale models of the real world is a way of exerting your influence… and crawler cranes are the epitome of small boys' aspirations.   You can see yourself gripping the levers of power, and feel the exertion of an influence beyond your physical strength.  The kinetics of craning, slewing and winching have fascinated since, and I guess there’s always the bonus of some entertainment when things go wrong.

Later, this childhood interest (which probably grew out of a family background in haulage) combined with the books I was reading, such as Lebbeus Woods’ writings on War and Architecture, and Paul Virilio’s “Unknown Quantity”.  The latter is a particularly thought-provoking book, and quite unlike anything else I’ve come across.  In it, Virilio explores a philosophical approach towards unpredictability and disaster.  Once I’d read it through a couple of times, it suddenly clicked – here is a rational response to the seeming chaos of the world, from earthquakes and hurricanes, to the smaller scale disorder and disasters of building sites, which I’ve touched on before.  The ground opens up while the truckmixer is reversing; the shifting sands swallow up an excavator; artics end up stuck in muddy fields; cranes topple over and have to be rescued … by bigger cranes.

Truckmixer in the mud …

Watching the process of a lorry being extracted from a morass of mud is always interesting: when the ground doesn’t have sufficient bearing capacity, the wheels sink in, and the vehicle ends up resting on the rails of its chassis.  If it has keeled over as well … then it’s a full-blown recovery job, using two 50-tonne cranes and an ex-Army wrecker truck with crane and triple winches. Even to tip this thing back on its feet might become a nightmare, with baulks of timber, snatch blocks, Tirfor winches to restrain it, and a silent prayer to the God of Unconventional Lifting … then a great heave from a 6-, 8- or even 10-wheel drive rescue truck is needed to pull it clear of the bog’s suction.  Of course, lorry rescue is a specialist business, and heavy goods vehicles are never towed on rope or chains.  The two vehicles are connected by an umbilical cord in the form of an air line (since, unless there’s compressed air in the stranded vehicle’s tanks, its brakes will stay applied), but the towing lorry does the braking for both vehicles, with all the retardation transferred through a rigid steel towbar.  There are classic photos in one book about the construction of Scottish hydropower schemes, demonstrating how even tracklayers can get stuck in Perthshire’s peatbogs, and had to be hauled out using Cat D12 bulldozers. 

Scammell S24 tractor

Machines stuck in the mud have the scope to become a slapstick comedy – Laurel and Hardy made the most of sticky situations like this, and usually ended up lying face down in the mud, with a Model T minus all its bodywork, a great cloud of black smoke, and a braying donkey looking on …  I can sympathise.  It rained so hard one day that a small river formed on Princes Street, and people began herding pairs of animals into a large timber structure resembling a boat.  Meantime, I arrived on site to discover the contractor trying to rescue a cherrypicker which was trapped in the glaur.  A large crowd of workmen looked on as a JCB full-slew tried to propel the cherrypicker out of its rut – by whacking its engine pod using a huge two cubic metre bucket.  It looked like something from Robot Wars – except there was no sign of a glamorous TV frontwoman wearing leather trousers – and although the excavator eventually won, I’m glad I didn’t have to take the cherrypicker back to the hire shop.  I’m certain there must have been an awkward moment …

Bert's JCB full-slew …

Tunnel Boring Machines or “TBM’s” are another good example of Homo Faber versus world.  A typical shield boring machine, as built by James Howden in Glasgow, may weigh 500 tons, cost £10 milllion, and drive a tunnel 6 metres in diameter at a speed of two revolutions per minute.  The TBM is large and complex, leaving the factory on a series of oversize low-loaders, and often taking weeks to erect in its new underground habitat.  Disaster follows when, as in the case of the Storebaelt tunnel in Denmark a few years ago, the sea floods in.  One year later and with only minor progress since work started, however, the project was struck by the first of several really spectacular disasters: a water burst from the seabed found its way through the TBM-head which had been left open due to modification works.  Both 300 m long tunnel drives were instantly flooded, and the two TBM’s seriously damaged.  They needed a complete rebuild.  The high stakes involved conform to Virilio’s perception of … disaster.

Howden TBM

And so to the construction of buildings.  Construction is carefully planned, but ground conditions in particular have a habit of thwarting us.  Man tries to defy the universe – universe wins.  A hydraulic excavator scraped away the dry soil and began shifting the rock underlying it.  The machine worked all morning, its boom sweeping around balletically, and its counterweights sliding like part of a pinball machine.  Soon, men were driving steel pins and timber profiles shaped like a hangman’s gibbet into the soil.  Then with a squeal of steel against steel, an NCK piledriver crawled onto the site, looking rather reptilian.  The piledriver moved hard against the cliff face, slewed its gear into position – and there was a flash of light and a crack! like lightning.  There was a high voltage cable in the path of the steel pile: it was wrapped in black tarry stuff like elephant hide, which had been split apart by the short in the circuit.  Thankfully, the driver of the piledriver was saved by his rubber-soled boots, and his rubber-mounted seat.

What the drowned TBM, stranded lorry and zapped piledriver prove is that we’re surrounded by entropy.  What we casually dismiss as Murphy’s Law is actually a sign of the fundamental laws (or lawlessness) of Nature.  We try to impose order, but the universe is always trying to return to a state of entropy, energy returning to its basis state – into disorder.  The result is that we have to improvise, using machines, when things go wrong.  Yet entropic chaos has been used by artists and musicians, like John Cage, and even architects, such as Lucien Kroll or Elemer Zalotay.  It may seem perverse to consciously “design” something to appear random, and the result may be a bit like the so-called random number generator on your calculator, which if you think about it can never be truly random since it’s working to a programme – yet there is an honesty in the approach of to anyone who admits to chaos, rather than forcing order on reluctant materials.

Murphy strikes again …

Rescue is practical way to deal with trucks which are stuck; aleatoric design is intellectual way to rationalise the seeming randomness of the world and its forces.  Yet there’s also an emotional side too: as Paul Virilio suggests, we have a morbid fascination with disaster, and if we spot that lorry stuck in a bog, our sympathy for the hapless driver is mixed with a little derision, a sense of the futility of Man’s actions, or the stupidity of building contractors.  If we apply ourselves to the problem, we need to prepare – from karabiners, slings and desccenders – through block-and-tackle, wire ropes and bog mats – to that Scammell S24 tank tractor which comes in really handy when you become well and truly stuck.

Hungry Joe in Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22” collected lists of fatal diseases and arranged them in alphabetical order so that he could quickly put his finger on the one he most wanted to worry about … we are in a similar fix, except that there are many more things on a building site that could go wrong …