Alberti Lecture, Wash U

Recently Elise Novak and I gave a Saturday afternoon lecture to the Alberti students at Washington University.  This is probably about the 6th year in a row that we (Fox) has presented a topic.  Past years topics have been closely related to work in the office, but this year we chose to go a different route.  The topic was “Structure – what makes things stand up?”

We had the students participate in demonstrations of Compression and Tension, Triangulation, Center of Gravity and Uplift, among other concepts.  Perhaps the biggest success we had was with the portion of the presentation called “Guess the Structural Concept – Win a Prize”.  The concepts included things demonstrated above, and various structural systems, including Post and Beam, Arch/Vault and Space Frame.  The prizes were “I Love Architecture” pencils, donated by the St. Louis Chapter, American Institute of Architects.  Pandemonium ensued, a good time was had by all, and hopefully someone learned something.  The Students then went on to design a sports stadium (we ended our talk looking at several stadiums and talking about the various structural concepts).

Thanks to Gay Lorberbaum – she runs Alberti and like Jake and Elwood in the Blues Brothers, Gay is on a mission from God.  It’s great to be a small part of such a great program!