The title of my last entry was ‘Engineering is All Around Us’, well it’s still there. I promised last time that I would share some of the engineering marvels I encountered while in the great city of St. Louis, if you haven’t been you should go sometime before you reach the light at the end of the tunnel.
After visiting the arch, my cohorts and I continued our journey onto a special place called the City Museum. (www.citymuseum.org) Now, one trait of a good writer is the ability to put a vision into words. In other words, not just saying what you saw, but telling what you saw. Alright I don’t know if that last sentence really made much sense, but the point here is that putting this place, the City Museum, into words is going to be extremely difficult. One short, sweet description would be to liken it to Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, no pun intended.
More specifically, a Willy Wonka factory where the endless variations and derivations of candy are substituted with some of the most creative jungle gyms I’ve ever seen. It’s a place where the only difference between an adult and a child is physical appearance. I’ve never been somewhere where simple activities so sincerely bridged the age gap between adults and children. And while the activities themselves are simple, the combination of them is as creative as Willy Wonka’s chocolate river.
Upon entering the museum, you have a complex cave system where you have free reign to climb around. You can choose whichever path you'd like to explore, whether it be a common spacious corridor, or a tiny rabbit hole that, if you are able to fit through it, opens up into a large cavern where at the other side of the room is a staircase that leads to some unknown destination. I fit through the rabbit hole and upon hearing the faint sound of what seemed like organ music, decided to follow it and took the staircase.
When I reached the top of the stairs I was again in another large room where at the other side I saw an enormous organ, with pipes reaching up to 40 ft in the sky. To my right was a winding staircase that seemed to go up forever. I took the staircase as I listened to the eerie organ music, and after what seemed like ten minutes reached the top and was shocked to see that the only way back down was to take the slide. I later learned from museum employees that this slide stood seven stories tall! The intricacies of these staircases and cave systems were incredibly creative, and as I climbed around, I realized that to ensure the safety of the thousands of people that played in them week in and week out, that a truly masterful and competent engineer is the only possible person who could have conjured this creation.
Now being that it was the Thanksgiving holiday, my mother was with me of course, as well as my girlfriend, and I’m proud to say that both of them kept up with me through all of the caves and slides and other apparatus’.
After working up a sweat we decided to pay a visit to the skateless park, which was a fully functioning skate park equipped with ramps and rails, but no skateboarding is allowed…interesting. Another section of the museum is dedicated to the arts. A free pottery section, a small circus-like demonstration, and a snowflake cutting room where Ms. Marion sits telling stories as you cut out your creations. We visited the snowflake cutting room and as I listened to Ms. Marion, I couldn’t help feeling like a kid again. If at this point you think I’m crazy, I promise I’m not making this stuff up.
The truly impressive engineering creation of this place was the massive jungle gym outside. This thing was made of old airplane cabins and re-bar, and reached heights of up to fifty feet high. Makes the McDonald’s playground seem like that cheap swingset you find at the park. The one part of the outside jungle gym that I found most impressive, and at the same time scary, was the cages composed of two foot welded together metal rods. The cages were formed into a small tunnel form and were suspended above the ground by cables and chains that were fixed to the building. As I climbed through the tunnels, I couldn’t help but think to myself that some of the welds looked a bit suspect. I said to myself, “I’ll wait until all those other people climb through before I go”
I’m rambling and I could go on for pages and pages about this place called the City Museum. I highly recommend that you check out the link for the website. Definitely one of the coolest places I’ve ever been, and another example of the many possible applications of a creative engineering mind. And to top it all the off, the building is powered with wind energy, and that just adds a few more to the cool points category in my opinion. It’s a place where you can go and forget that you are getting old. One dose of this place a month is a good prescription for a healthy mind.
So to all you future engineers out there, especially the ones thinking of coming to UNT, be creative with your ideas. Think outside of the box. This is the only way that new ideas will come forward, which in turn leads to progress as a human race.
