Day in Harlem

In Harlem I found my way to no. 17, East 126th Street which has survived relatively unchanged since being the location for the classic 1958 photo "Great Day in Harlem" featuring 57 jazz greats. 

A later re-enactment in 2008, for the documentary film "The Girls in the Band"  aimed to restore the gender balance by featuring mainly women jazz artists. Pianist Marian McPartland was in both pictures.

NYC jazz

While passing through New York for the first time during visits to some US engineering schools, I was able to visit some iconic jazz locations. Apart from catching some memorable gigs at Smalls (whose live video feeds had delighted me online for years) and Smoke (familiar to me from a Peter Bernstein DVD), I also got to see the Williamsburg Bridge of Sonny Rollins fame.

A highlight of my visit to the National Jazz Museum in Harlem was the historic telegram from a young Count Basie in 1936 which effectively announced that he had taken over leadership of the Buster Moten Band which was to evolve into the Count Basie Band.

A week in Paris, will ease the bite of it ...

as Billy Strayhorn was known to say.

Returning to Paris for a brief visit after 30 years, I was  reminded of some of the qualities that had remained with me after my first visit. The attention to detail in display like in this fruit and vegetable  shop is quite striking:

  

.An aspect of the scale of buildings I noticed is that many edifices in the centre of Paris tend to make one feel rather small. The centres of capitals like Lisbon or Amsterdam I find more satisfyingly human 

scale, by comparison.

 The Pompidou Centre complex was worth revisiting just to marvel at its exoskeleton design which looks as innovative today as it did back in the 70’s with its mechanical systems made visible outside rather than concealed inside the structure as is still the norm in most buildings. The escalators connecting the floors are external to the complex.

Functional structural elements of the building are color-coded: green pipes are plumbing, blue ducts are for climate control, electrical wires are encased in yellow, and circulation elements and devices for safety (e.g., fire extinguishers) are red.

Apparently the designer of the Nike Air trainers was inspired by the Pompidou Centre concept!

First time I've seen a covered bridge

Up in the mountainous former goldrush land of Nevada County, Northern California I had a chance to visit a different type of toll bridge – the Bridgeport covered bridge which in its heyday used to charge 1$ per horse and 50 cents per rider to cross above the fast-running Yuba river.

Built in 1862, it qualifies as a Historic Civil Engineering Landmark  designated by the American Society of Civil Engineers. It uses a Howe Through-truss design  and is one of the longest of the covered bridges still existing in the US.

Gold-panning is permitted in the Yuba river although given the powerful current on the day due to melting snows upstream I didn’t try my luck.

Certainly not the first Irishman to trudge through the Yuba River valley, now preserved as a National Park, I naturally enough found myself humming the old Irish tune Mursheen Durken

“As sure as me name is Kearney,

I’ll be off to California

an’ instead of diggin’ praties

I’ll be digging lumps of gold”

The classic 1968 Dubliners version can be found on Youtube and I had the pleasure of accompanying Dubliner Ronnie Drew on guitar as he sang this in cabaret back in the 80’s in Cork city when he was touring as a solo act.

One also needs to be on the look-out for wandering mountain lions and for poison oak around these parts apparently – didn’t see any of the former and carefully avoided the latter! 

Golden Gate vs. 25 April

While at a technology management conference in San José, California I took the opportunity to visit San Francisco.  It was interesting to compare its bridge with the Lisbon one I have been crossing regularly over the last 22 years (see earlier post for comments on Sydney bridge).

The Golden Gate suspension bridge with a span of 1,280 metres is said to have the 9^th longest span in the world for this type of structure while Lisbon’s 25 April bridge with a span of 1,013 metres comes in at number 21.

There have been some cases of suicide over the years on the 25 April even though it does not allow pedestrians to cross. The Californian bridge does allow pedestrians – albeit with a helpline for the suicidal.

Cyclists too!

Two other points of difference:

There doesn’t appear to be a permanent separation between the incoming and outgoing traffic lanes as we have in Lisbon. I assume this is to give flexibility in lane assignation in periods of high one-way traffic, but it does assume a high quality of driving discipline on the part of users.

On both bridges the toll is paid only on city entry but the Californian predominantly manual cash collection system seems much slower than the Lisbon version which has been largely automatic using the Via Verde RFID-based system for many years.

Update 1 (2013)

There were 2 separate incidents involving teenagers surviving falls from the bridge in 2011. One of these was a suicide attempt while the other is believed to have been a stunt. There has been an average of 25 suicides per year from the bridge with a total of 12,000 deaths since the bridge opened. A controversial film, The Bridge, recorded the leaps of 24 of these in 2004. The bridge is 60 m above water level (the Lisbon 25 April bridge is 70 m)

Update 2 (2013)

Tollbooths were discontinued in March 2013 in favour of an electronic system that photographs licence plates. 

Two things learnt in Jordan

While in Jordan for the EDUCON 2011 conference we got a chance to visit Petra and Wadi Rum desert.

  1) At Petra I was intrigued to see the series of rectangular marks either side of the carved entrance to the Treasury. According to our guide Isam, they were the locations of the scaffold used by the artisans to carve the intricate designs higher up on the structure. As the lower part didn’t have this kind of detail they were not necessary there (click picture for a better view).

2) In both the Arab script (here in a carving of T E Lawrence in Wadi Rum) and the ancient pictograms of Bedouin (also in Wadi Rum) the script is right to left. Apparently early written languages (Sumerian, Arabic etc) were right to left because they were carved in stone and this was easier from R to L with early writing instruments. 

When writing with ink on papyrus in Egypt and parchment in Greece became more common, L to R was more convenient. In fact Greek started out R to L and later changed over and this in turn gave rise to Latin and other modern European scripts.

Singapore 3 - street sights

The  city centre is mostly modern but the Little India and Chinatown quarters feature an interesting  mixture of colonial and contemporary architecture

 Educational sign in a market complex: 

"The way to Pronounce Tuition is  too-ish-uhn"

Street sign advertising unusual product at the extensive Mustafa's Department Store:

 and nearby a warning about inappropriate public behaviour:

Singapore 2 - Buddha Tooth Relic Temple

There was a ceremony taking place when I came across the temple as I was exploring the Chinatown quarter. Clicking gives a larger version of the photo.

 Temple roof garden with prayer wheel

Singapore 1 - 57 story hotel

In Singapore for the  ASEE GLOBAL COLLOQUIUM ON ENGINEERING EDUCATION  at the Marina Bay Sands hotel gave the opportunity to check out what some consider an important example of modern hotel construction. The 3 towers of the hotel are joined at the top of their 57 story structure by a Skypark with swimming pool. Although undoubtedly impressive, the casino, luxury shopping mall and general hubris of the undertaking left me with a certain ambivalence. 

That being said, my pre-breakfast and moonlight swims in the vanishing-edge pool at the start and end of each day  were unforgettable. Pictures below show the pool during a tropical storm and on a normal day. The city was under a noticeable haze at the time due to the atmospheric effects of forest fires in Sumatra.

Really Madrid

Was in Madrid recently for the IEEE Educon 2010 conference.

Rooftop view from my central Madrid hotel showing arched Moorish-style windows:

Felix Candela was a Madrid-born structural engineer noted for construction work using thin shells made out of reinforced concrete which was very advanced technically for its time.

As he spent much of his life in exile during Franco’s time most of the public buildings he designed are outside Spain, principally in Mexico, but the roof of the Our Lady of Guadaloupe church in Madrid is a good example of this aesthetically pleasing combination of material science and geometrical design. The style had its heyday in the period from the 1950’s to 1980’s but has since gone out of favour with the development of more versatile construction materials.