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Science is Applied Engineering
We were designing and building things long before we had a “scientific” methods and mathematical solution techniques – and we still do today. Did we need to wait for mathematical understanding of a...
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Pics of 8 Residential Projects in Construction
Long Island… Worcester MA… Boston, MA… Long Island, NY… Western CT… Narragansett, RI… Block Island, RI… Providence, RI…
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AEER-TF7 Arch/Eng Emergency Response Task Force 7
As a team member of AEER TF-7 (working with Urban Search and Rescue), Erik was deployed to the RI coast to placard buildings that were deemed unsafe. Here are a couple pictures Erik took last week of...
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28: Email Well (Less Words, More Pics)
As a design community we email poorly – way too many words, not enough pictures/sketches/details/screen shots. It is still the coordination tool of choice today, but there isn’t one way to email....
View ArticleListening is an underrated sense to us Engineers
Seth Horowitz, an auditory neuroscientist at Brown University and the author of “The Universal Sense: How Hearing Shapes the Mind”, wrote a terrific article in the New York Times called The Science and...
View ArticleShipping Containers in Construction
Here is a link to a story about using shipping containers in construction with our project in Providence featured in the story…...
View ArticleErik Nelson Interview on Civil Engineering Today
I was interviewed by host Reed Brockman regarding the Engineer’s Manifesto for Growth. Check out the youtube video…
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Harpoon Brewary Takes a New Shape
We redesigned the entrance and created a new opening, grand stair and elevator in the existing waffle slab building. This allows Harpoon to have more room to host beer tours and contains a large...
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“Economical Welds” published in MSC
In January 2013, Ethan and I published an article in MSC related to reducing the amount of expensive CJP welds and substituting fillets welds instead. We provided a simple table to assist the...
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Platonic Solids from Perfect Triangles
Here are Plato’s two perfect triangles from his seminal work “Timaeus” that can create the 5 platonic solids (which are according to him form the elements of earth, air, water, fire …) They are worth...
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Cable Y-Hangs and Pulleys
You can imagine a person hanging from a cable that forms a Y in shape between to cliffs. What are the forces in the cables? Well we can build this by adding a wight in the middle of a system, and...
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Archimedes and Balance Beams
You can introduce concepts of moment and equilibrium by building a simple balance beam… The weights times the distances on each side of the fulcrum have to equal. I added nails at 1″ spacings and use...
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Build the Golden Ratio
Here is how you can build the most excellent rectangle ever conceived… You start with a square, and you use one edge center point as a centroid of the quarter circle as shown above. Then you can...
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The Perfect Arch
For a arch to be prefect, it must be shaped such that it is in uniform compression. Basically the inverse of a hanging chain. So we can build what Robert Hooke describes in 1675 “as hangs the...
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Build a Lamella Dome
Lamella structures are created using many pieces of the exact same member shape and connection. So 1000 pieces of something and stacked in a certain manner… You can imagine it can get pretty big...
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The Secret to Trusses
Trusses are simply built out of triangles. The trick is to determine which members are in tension and which members are in compression. There are only two types of triangles, one that has two...
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Arcade transformed to Micro-Apartments
We were involved in helping reshape the future of this iconic building…the nations oldest shopping mall into tiny lofts. Here is a great recent article… http://www.architizer.com/en_us/ We worked...
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