Enthusing

In view of all that I wrote yesterday about Sheffield's historical association with steel, including specialist heavy steel for construction, it is a little bit ironic that one of the city's main millennium projects was built using structural timber. And not iconic English oak, but (probably Siberian) larch engineered into a bonded, layered composition called 'glulam' (glued laminate, geddit?)

Although 'laminate', for me, raises the spectre of cheap, spongy, faux-wood flooring, this is apparently a hi-tech, high-spec material, manufactured to precision standards in one of the European countries that chose nurture, rather than scorched earth, as a policy for its manufacturing sector - i.e. Germany. The building is called the Winter Garden; functionally it is a covered thoroughfare in the city centre, without commerce beyond a pop-up café and a shop for the linked (free to enter) millennium galleries

It is a 'garden' because it houses exotic plants, especially species from arid environments. Some of these have labels, and the flowers and foliage and sheer scale of some of them are very impressive, and beautiful, but it is not really designed to be a plant exhibition building, just an unusual, pleasing and imaginative space in the heart of a post-industrial, regenerating city

If I sound a bit like a tourist brochure, we have had a day as tourists, and come away enthused by the city our son has chosen to call home. I have a month's worth of blip photos, and more accumulated knowledge about steel and cutlery, the association between the city and John Ruskin, the impact of some catastrophic historic floods on the city's identity, and the high quality of some of the fine art that has been germinated here. We also hit a bullseye with our random choice of lunchtime cafe in the student quarter - a meal that was a work of fine art in itself, with a taste that lived up to the first impression (I guess there's a pun there if you want to find it)

But I choose to post this shot of the Winter Garden for blipper MsMun, my co-founder of the Catenary Arch Appreciation Society. To quote an architectural review of the building: "an efficient shape that matches the force profile in the arch, thus reducing the size of the structural elements compared with traditional arch profiles". I can't quite believe my good fortune in stumbling across such a prominent example with which to sustain our enthusiasm

[sorry I don't have a way to include active links right now. MsMun's deep dive into curves is here... https://www.blipfoto.com/entry/3105077429975125738 ]