Professor Chris Wise Freng
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PASSION FOR ENGINEERING PROFILE TRAILBLAZING NUSTREAM has spent considerable time during each trip building up a relationship with the community and ensuring that they ENGINEER have been consulted during the design process and that they are given a solution to the problem of the lack of electricity that is appropriate for their current situation. A small number of batteries will be offered Professor Chris Wise FREng to residents in surrounding local villages to gauge interest in the battery scheme and if this proves to be successful, research will be undertaken to look at expanding the rural electrification model into these areas. From being a director at of one of the world’s leading Research has already taken place into the surrounding villages for their requirement engineering businesses, Chris Wise decided to go it alone of electricity and suitability of flowing water 14 years ago and set up a small engineering operation with for hydropower. In the near future, team members big ambitions. He tells Michael Kenward how he has, and remain dedicated to ensuring the existing always will, advocate the value of being unconventional. Teaching the local villagers about the hydropower scheme was a vital part of our job. In an area where and newly installed schemes are successful electricity was an abstract concept, we had to manage expectations. Some of the hardest parts of the project have been getting the community onside, engendering ownership, trust and gaining cooperation and that transition to full ownership of the people of Ruarwe takes place smoothly and demanded vast sums of money for access constructing a new kiosk building, supplying gradually, using the relationships built over and change of ownership of land that, until 50 additional batteries and providing further the last two years and the skills developed the request was made, had little or no value. training in operation and maintenance. We by the engineers. NUSTREAM will continue are also planning to complete the small-scale to function as an organisation, hopefully The waiting area of Expedition Engineering’s Cable Car in London as well as conducting hydropower installation. This will provide recruiting new students and financial backers office on Regent Street in London is R&D for human-powered transport in the US. Important for students additional wattage to supply power to the for the coming years. scattered with awards recognising the Some of his career favourites are the UK Taking everything into consideration, the community centre, and hopefully enough for impressive achievements of Chris Wise projects such as the Arup/Foster collaboration experience has been hugely rewarding for all More information at the primary school. A separate solar panel will and his colleagues. There are none of the for the American Air Museum, at Duxford. those involved. Feedback from the rest of the www.nustreamonline.com be supplied to the health centre to power glass-fronted display cabinets that many “And I love the Millennium Bridge in London,” team revealed that the experience has helped lighting and a fridge for vaccinations. companies prefer, and many of these awards he says. “I am also really proud of the Infinity to expand their appreciation of the wider BIOGRAPHY – the ones for the Olympic Velodrome and Bridge that crosses the Tees in Stockton,” world and how engineering can be used in a Amy Louise Wright is 23 years old Stockton’s Infinity Bridge, for example – are pointing over his shoulder to a large practical and beneficial way. Our time NUSTREAM now and from Sunderland, Tyne and Wear. tucked away at the back of bookshelves. photograph on the office wall of an elegant management and research skills have NUSTREAM’s aim has always been to provide Educated in County Durham, it was with The Infinity Bridge in Stockton, designed by Wise’s muted approach to these public footbridge – which featured in Infinity Crosses certainly been put to the test, but the biggest a sustainable solution for Ruarwe. All too her sixth form that she first visited Africa. Expedition. The 230m-long concrete walkway successes matches his own description The Tees, Ingenia 43. benefits have come from problem-solving as often, the mentality of volunteers travelling Having graduated from the University across the Tees is supported by a pair of asymmetric steel arches of himself as having gathered an While it is the architects who often part of a team in a remote area where from developed countries for short periods of of Nottingham in 2012, Amy is now “embarrassment of key personal awards”. get the publicity and the prizes for major working well with others was essential to time is well-meaning but not well thought employed by Sir Robert McAlpine North Among the projects that Expedition has constructions such as these, such projects overcoming seemingly insurmountable out: they may end up providing remote, rural East who support her in her management undertaken are international ones such as would not be possible without structural obstacles. We have all improved our fast villagers, who are used to very basic of NUSTREAM. the Las Arenas in Barcelona, a restoration of engineers. But what do these kinds of decision-making. On a personal note, the conditions, with new technology that is not a disused bullring that the company carried engineers do? “I think of it as a spatial trip provided me with a fantastic opportunity practicable for their needs. These installations The author would like to thank out. Expedition worked with architect Renzo discipline,” says Wise. “You are responsible to develop my leadership skills on an are often abandoned, neglected or not Tim Rushby-Smith for his help in the writing Piano on the green HQ tower for Turin’s for generating and creating the three- intense project. maintained and fall into disrepair soon after of this article and for all the family and Intesa Sanpaolo Bank and in Athens on the dimensional space in which everything The team returned in August 2013 the volunteers have left due to a lack of friends who have supported her with the new Greek national Library and Opera. The happens. You have to conceive it, you have to to expand the Energy Kiosk scheme by suitability and knowledge. running of NUSTREAM. company was also involved with the Thames put it there, you have to hold it there.” 42 INGENIA INGENIA ISSUE 56 SEPTEMBER 2013 43 Professor Chris Wise FREng PROFILE “ If you’re making a big three-dimensional space and stopping it falling down, making it beautiful, understanding the physical drivers, it is fundamentally an engineer’s job. In effect, a good piece of engineering is an architectural product.” On graduation, Wise was surprised to have intrinsic physical elegance.” The education puts it, “everybody listened to what I was trying to work out what the hell that means!” several job offers to pick from. He joined of engineers is important to Wise, who is saying as if I was correct”, but Wise says that In fact, the business has done some Ove Arup and Partners in 1979. “I accepted both a teacher and a practitioner. His rising he felt uncomfortable. “I thought that that trailblazing in its approach to staff Arup’s offer because they were the only reputation at Arup gave him an opportunity was ridiculous.” Maybe it was just because he development. The company managed to people who had done anything that I had to do something about the state of worked for Arup, “this big organisation which grow through the recession, but when heard of, the Sydney Opera House.” As a engineering education. The company, along is hugely respected. So if I say something project work was thin on the ground the young engineering recruit, Wise had no say with the Royal Academy of Engineering, it must be true.” Wise set out to reflect on company decided not to lay staff off, but in what sort of engineering he could work supported his professorship at Imperial this idea by taking leave of absence. When instead set aside money so that its engineers on. Thanks perhaps to the cathedral project, College when, in 1998, he became the first his chairman Duncan Michael FREng asked could think about their future. “In the first Arup decided Wise was destined to work in Chair of Civil Engineering Design. Wise if he would be coming back to Arup, he year of the recession, we put £400,000 into ‘structures’. “It wasn’t through choice,” he adds. Unlike some practising engineers confessed that he probably wouldn’t and was the pot for people not to work. Instead “I could have been selected for geotechnics, who also teach, Wise’s Chair was a full “immediately, albeit kindly”, shown the door. we said ‘You can come in to the studio industrial engineering, or railways or any professorship. “This was important,” he on Mondays, but you’re not obliged to do variety of options.” explains. “Unlike a visiting professorship, anything’,” says Wise. “We paid them to come While it may have been serendipity that it gave me some authority within the STARTING ANEW in to investigate their own futures.” The short-held notion of leave of absence turned Wise ‘structural’, it was clearly a good department. As a full professor, you have a The experiment has paid off, giving came to an end when he was talking to career move. His ascent within Arup was swift. meaningful hand in shaping the curriculum birth to two new businesses. Useful Richard Rogers. The architect was keen to In 1992, he became Arup’s youngest director, and how to teach it.” Simple Projects is a strategic sustainability work with Wise, but there was a snag: as Wise going on to become one of five board At Imperial College, Wise conceived consultancy, while Think Up focuses reports it, “He said, ‘It’s fantastic that you are directors responsible for 500 engineers and and co-founded the Constructionarium, on engineering education, inspiring on your own, but you will need to have a support staff.