A sanitary engineer

On Friday back to the Royal Institute (see reference 1) to hear Yewande Akinola talk to us about re-engineering our spaces. Ms. Akinola turned out to be an engaging speaker who gave us an interesting talk - she certainly did better than I would have done, and a great deal better than I would have done when I was her age. Nevertheless, I offer a few comments.

She appears to be a successful and well-regarded building services engineer working for Arup, a prestige outfit not particularly known to me for their commitment to helping the world's poor or to saving the planet. I think she should have been a bit more up-front about her affiliation.

Instead, she set off with a series of slides illustrating how in the olden days we liked to build show-off buildings like the British Museum and the Crystal Palace, whereas now we would do better to focus on providing decent and sensible housing for the several billion new people coming on stream over the next few decades. She missed, I thought, an opportunity to explain that there was much to be said, in this context, for building big buildings in big cities, this being the cheapest way, in all sorts of ways, to do the job. From these overview slides, she launched out into various intriguing schemes and wheezes which had caught her eye over the years.

She appears to specialise in providing watery services to buildings: clean water in for baths and dirty water out from toilets. But her sense of what would work on a powerpoint was not that clever and some of her stuff, while clever from a technical point of view, did not work for me. Perhaps she needs to change her media affairs adviser.

One of her schemes was built on the idea that if you collected rain water on the roof, it could just flow down the building, doing its business on its way and so avoiding the need for expensive pumping. On her way she suggested that making services in buildings more visible was good, one should not have to hide such things away at great expense, a proposition I entirely agree with. But I fail to see how collecting rain water on the roof is ever going to be a big part of supplying water to tower blocks, of either the residential or bureaucratic variety.

Another was the idea that one should not devote space to the exclusive service of the bathroom. Baths and toilets should be folded away when not in use and the space recycled for some other purpose. I was reminded of the hotels we came across recently which did something on the same lines, not bothering to put baths in bathrooms at all. Something which might be OK for the young & beautiful, but which struck me as a bit off for the rest of us. An engaging snippet in this connection was the idea of the talking bathroom, a bathroom which could tell you when you were getting a bit smelly and needed to take a shower or, alternatively, when you had been in the shower long enough and should get out. You had used quite enough water and should make way for someone else.

Along the way we had a not very satisfactory demonstration of a silica based coating which would protect all kinds of materials from damp and stains. The trick, it seems, is to fiddle slightly with basic sand to make it water repellent. A wonder of chemical engineering, but a wonder which did not quite come off to those of us who were sitting at the side of the lecture theatre. Must remember to sit in the middle next time.

At question time she was asked to comment on how awful it was that lots of the fancy new flats going up in London just presently were destined to stand empty for their natural life, having been bought by rich foreigners of one sort or another. Had I thought of it in time I might have chipped in with the observation that this was a jolly good way of balancing our otherwise dreadful balance of payments. If rich foreigners were happy to pump their money into fancy buildings in London and not trouble us with their presence, great. A trick that the people of Devon have been trying to pull off with holiday makers for years. Keeping the flats empty was a small price to pay. Instead, just think of all the job creation.

Refreshment at the Goat, followed by a Green Park tube station rather full of rather noisy young people. And this well before closing time. What were they thinking of?

PS: according to the owners, Taylor Walker, there has been a Goat on roughly the same site in Albemarle Street since 1696, with the present building dating from 1878.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/boundaries.html.

Reference 2: http://www.yewandeakinola.co.uk/.

Reference 3: http://www.arup.com/News/.