engineering
I’ve spent a lot of time being happy in the past couple weeks. On the personal side, my wife and I recently welcomed our first grandchild into the family, cradling our oldest daughter’s baby in our arms hours after her birth and flashing back to doing the same with each of our three girls when they, too, emerged freshly into the world. I had no idea what
It’s speculated that the exterior spaces at Playboy Mansion West must be the most photographed in the world. That’s hard to quantify, of course, but it’s certainly safe to say that since construction began in the 1970s, the home of publisher Hugh Hefner and its famous swimming pool and grotto have been used ceaselessly to promote
In July last year, the city of Chicago unveiled its newest civic landmark: Millennium Park, a world-class artistic and architectural extravaganza in the heart of downtown. At a cost of more than $475 million and in a process that took more than six years to complete, the park transformed a lakefront space once marked by unsightly railroad tracks and ugly parking lots into a civic showcase. The creation of the 24.5-acre park brought together an unprecedented collection of
Of all the concepts of hydraulic-system design, there are few that have more importance than the correlation between water flow (that is, capacity expressed as gallons per minute) and line velocity (the speed at which the water travels). As water travels through a pipe, its increase in speed (that is, its line velocity) results in an increase in resistance (expressed as feet of head) and in a reduction of end pressure, which is measured in pounds per square inch (psi). In other words, an increase in friction losses and a drop in pressure is the result of increased water velocity at a given flow. If that makes sense to you without further explanation, then you know much of what you need to know when it comes to
In most projects, great work requires the watershaper’s personal understanding of who the clients really are, deep down. That doesn’t mean we have to become our clients’ best friends or marry into their families. Rather, creating watershapes at the highest level involves a different kind of relationship, one in which a
