THE BUILDING AND THE EGG// Design in nature

<image source for sydney opera house>

It's crazy to think that some of the most fascinatingly beautiful  and complex buildings are designed around a structural concept that can also be found in an everyday object sitting in your fridge.

The immortalized roof structure of the Sydney Opera House, designed by  Jørn Utzon with engineers Ove Arup and Partners was designed around the concept of that concrete shells were structurally stable form resistant structure.  These thin shells are able to span huge distances because their shape can resist loads by developing stresses in their own plane.  So simply stated, the elegant thinness and curved nature of these shells is actually exactly what gives these forms their structural strength! Not only is it beautiful, it has a reason for being that way.

You could virtually build any curved shape using this principle but granted, it's not as easy as it sounds.  It requires a really sophisticated level of mathematical analysis by engineers and can get really costly when it comes to construction.   So in other words,unless you have enormous stacks of cash hidden in your bedroom mattress, you're not going to be going through all this trouble for the everyday building.

But that being said, nature seems to have the opposite approach! This concept of form resistant structures has been popping up in bird nests all over the world since the beginning of time.  As you can observe from everyday experience,when you take an egg in the palm and wrap your hand evenly around it, it can resist a great deal of uniformly distributed load in relation to how thin it is because of its shape.  Pretttttty nifty, no?

If that egg were in the shape of a cube, I can almost guarantee you that chickens would be extinct by now!  and you of course know what that means right?  Say goodbye to your roast chicken, your pollo asada tacos, your omelettes, your fried rice, pretty much all baked goods- bread, cakes, rolls, scones, croissants; your custard, ice cream, quiche, meatballs....ok I'm going to stop listing things now because this could go on forever and it's making me really sad, haha!

Anyway, in other news, I rescheduled my test from the 5th to the 14th!  I'm kind of bummed about this, because at this point I just want to get this exam over with and move on with life! But I guess it's better safe that sorry right?  Anyway, I hope you enjoy you weekend, wherever it takes you.  And if it happens to involve eggs at one point, I hope you able to stop and appreciate their structure for a second or two!