Dear Feier:
I’m sorry not to reply your letter in time. I’d like to introduce my work to you and other friends. Civil engineering is opposite to military engineering. It covers a lot of majors, such as buildings, factories, bridges, roads, tunnels and other constructions. In China we divide civil engineering into four parts: apartment or public construction; factory constructions; bridges or tunnels and railway or road project. Most civil engineers work for the first two parts, which we know more about it. Civil engineer might work in different phrases of project. According to construction sequence three different jobs are listed in following: the first one is design, the second is construction and the third is supervisal. I’m a structure engineer of design, so I will introduce design project in details.
I seldom design for buildings or apartments. Structure engineer cares more about unitary structure rather than its style or outlook. Different department might attract you in its unique architecture style or color while they’re almost same in structure design. Buildings always have foundation, columns, main beams (minor beams), floors and roof. Structure engineer design the size, style and number of reinforcing steel bars. Foundation is always underground and you seldom notice it. If you happen to see a foundation construction site, you always find a big pit with many stakes and supporting platforms in it. Foundation is the most important part of building. Structure engineer pay more attention to it for its importance, because it’s very complicated underground and there’s no way to remedy if something is wrong. We often design foundation safe enough to support upper structures.
Now steel structure apartments are not popular in China. Most of them are built in reinforced concrete structure. I’d like to introduce apartment in reinforced concrete structure as an example. Architecture engineer design the outlook of apartment, floor level, total height, horizontal size and style of roof. They always know basic knowledge of structure and put columns and beams on every floor plan if they think it’s essential. Then they deliver draft plan drawings to structure engineer. Structure engineer reads these drawings carefully and decide whether the building can be built. Sometime architecture could be realized but it’s not so reasonable. Structure engineer will discuss with architecture engineer about the discrimination and then draw to same conclusion. For example, architecture engineer likes big hall without columns and they hope other columns are as small as possible, because it looks terrible with big column outstanding the wall. The apartment will fall apart if columns are not big enough or number of column is fewer. After draft plans are passed by all of them (include customer), they will develop details. Structure engineer calculate exact size of columns, beams and cover floors while reinforcing steel bar is decided at the same time. You always notice a nude concrete frame without walls or windows, which is the result of structure engineer’s design. Architecture engineer design walls, windows, roof and decorated line. So the wonderful apartments before you are masterpiece of architecture engineer. Suppose human being is made at one night, skeleton is designed by structure while muscles, blood and wearing are designed by architecture. So one girl looks beautiful it’s all from architecture, on one would praise her for beautiful skeleton, because it’s invisible and it looks ugly.
I have no idea if I express myself clearly. I will tell you more if I have time. Best regard to you!
