Engineering The Shard, Roma Agrawal: MBE (member-only)

Building skyscrapers is an incredibly complex task. From the complexities of designing foundations to considering wind forces, and working with multi-disciplinary teams in busy urban areas.

Today we’re joined by an engineer who worked on the design of Western Europe’s tallest tower, The Shard. We delve into the unique challenges she came across and the top-down construction method that was used for maximum efficiency, along with what she learned about the importance of relationships in the engineering space.

Our guest is an engineer, physicist, author and presenter with almost 15 years experience in the industry. It’s a pleasure to have Roma Agrawal, MBE.

THINGS WE SPOKE ABOUT
●   The historical significance of The Shard design
●   Challenges of building a skyscrapers foundations
●   Considering factors such a local disruption and wind force
●   Collaboration and team-work across multiple disciplines
●   Why we need to shout louder about engineering success

GUEST DETAILS
Roma Agrawal is an engineer, author and presenter who is best known for working on the design of The Shard, Western Europe's tallest tower. She studied at Imperial College London and the University of Oxford. Roma has given lectures to thousands at universities, schools and organisations around the world, including TEDx talks. She has also presented numerous TV shows for the BBC, Channel 4 and Discovery, and hosts her own podcast, Building Stories.
Her first book, BUILT (2018) won an AAAS science book award and has been translated into eight languages.

MORE INFORMATION
Looking for ways to explore or advance a career in the field of engineering? Visit Engineers Ireland to learn more about the many programs and resources on offer. https://www.engineersireland.ie/

Engineers Journal AMPLIFIED is produced by DustPod.io for Engineers Ireland.

QUOTES
"I really love the idea of responding to what's there. This building could only have been on this particular site." - Roma Agrawal

"There's lots of different systems that have to work together to make sure that a big skyscraper stays stable." - Roma Agrawal

"A building like The Shard, we predict might move about half a metre. What's key as a structural engineer is to make sure that we don't feel that." - Roma Agrawal

"As a student, I don't think I ever understood how essential the skill of being able to work with other people is to be an engineer." - Roma Agrawal

"I think being enthusiastic about what you do is a big thing. I think we're all too modest." - Roma Agrawal

KEYWORDS
#construction #theshard #site #management #wind #design #collaboration #engineering

TRANSCRIPTION
For your convenience, we include an automated transcription.

Dusty Rhodes 00:01
Right now, on AMPLIFIED, engineering The Shard.

Roma Agrawal 00:03
What we did was a method called top-down construction. So that means we're building downwards and upwards at the same time. That technique had never been used before in a building of this size, and definitely not to construct the core of the building, which is the central spine of the building.

Dusty Rhodes 00:21
Hi there. My name is Dusty Rhodes, and welcome to AMPLIFIED the Engineers Journal podcast. Skyscraper building is not exactly up there for things Ireland is famous for. But what if you were charged with designing one for the centre of one of our major cities? How do you handle working in a constricted space? How high can you go? What forces are you dealing with as you go up, and what foundation do you support the whole thing on. Our guest today is going to share some amazing stories about all of these challenges because she spent six years of her life designing the foundations and the spire for the world-famous Shard building in London. She is a structural engineer whose many accolades including being voted the UK's young Structural Engineer of the Year becoming an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and a fellow of the institution of structural engineers. It's a pleasure to welcome Roma Agarwal, how are you, Roma,

Roma Agrawal 01:11
I'm great. How are you doing?

Dusty Rhodes 01:15
Very good. Listen. Let's get straight into the Shard. How did you get involved in designing the foundations and the spire on this world-famous skyscraper?

Roma Agrawal 01:25
Sure. So I guess the short answer is, I managed to get a graduate position with a company back in 2005 and the first project that I worked on was a footbridge, which is in Newcastle. And I spent about 18 months working on that in a very small team. And then once that was coming to its end, my boss said to me, Roma, do you fancy working on The Shard? And I did a very kind of cool and composed Yes, yes. That would be lovely, while secretly, kind of screaming in my head,

Dusty Rhodes 01:58
amazing. Listen The building itself is famous for having many angled sides. To say it stands out the minute you see it, which point towards the sky. But there's a historical story behind that, related to the ground. Tell me about that.

Roma Agrawal 02:15
It's a very interesting point, because a lot of people say, Oh, why is this building at London Bridge? It should be in the City of London, or Canary Wharf, or somewhere where there's other tall buildings. But actually, The Shard couldn't have been anywhere else, because the geometry of The Shard is inspired by the site which was bombed during the Second World War. So the London Bridge station sits on top of these old Victorian arches which have been there since the 1800s and a portion of those were destroyed, leaving quite a jagged shaped site. So what the architect Renzo Piano did was to look at the shape of that site, kind of draw, I guess, an irregular, octagonal sort of shape, and then project the sides up at about five or six degrees lean. And that's what created the geometry of The Shard. So it's completely a site specific piece of architecture. It's not just a rectangular building that you could stick

Dusty Rhodes 03:09
anywhere. So it wasn't a design feature. Was something that essentially was helping it deal with the actual ground that was standing on, yes,

Roma Agrawal 03:17
and it was also a way, I guess, of using every millimetre of space that was available on this construction site, because you're in the middle of London, it's an extraordinarily expensive and busy part of the city. And so, you know, people really want to maximise the space that they're creating in a, you know, commercial building. So, so from all of those different perspectives, it really made sense. And I think design wise, I really love the idea of responding to what's there, rather than just saying, Okay, here's a generic building that could be anywhere, but no this, this building could only have been on this particular site.

Dusty Rhodes 03:52
So how did that site and that particular constraint, if you want to put it that way, with the design, how does that impact the design of the foundation?

Roma Agrawal 04:00
So the foundations were such an interesting part of the building, and sadly, the bit that nobody ever sees again once it's finished, what we were looking to do was to go down three levels of basement. A lot of the plant of the building is down in the basement. So the huge air conditioning and air, sorry, air cooling units that push the air around the building, huge water tanks, you know, the sewage system, all sorts of stuff that such a tall building absolutely needs, but you don't want to see that stuff. So stick that in the building. There's space for parking 12 cars, very specific. So we needed to go down about three stories. And what we did was we put up what we call a sea camped piled wall. And for those who are not engineers in your audience and have never heard of that, what it means is that you basically put in some softer piles, which are big concrete columns that dig straight down into the ground. And then between the softer piles, you put in a hard. Pile. You're basically creating the walls of a bath, in a way. And then you can dig down in within that wall structure. And that structure is designed to keep the water out. There's a lot of ground water in London, because we're next to the river, keeps the water out. And the wall that we created the basement also, you know, really does reflect the shape of the site. So again, we were really maximising how much basement area we could get.

Dusty Rhodes 05:28
How do you need to think about the design of a foundation for a skyscraper in particular? I mean, a lot of people listening will be well used to buildings, you know, five, maybe 10 stories maximum here in Ireland. But when you're dealing with a building that's got almost 90 stories, what? What are the differences when designing the foundation? What are the considerations?

Roma Agrawal 05:47
I mean, the obvious one is that the loads are huge. So we've got, we've got a lot of loads coming down. So we really need to think about kind of the deep ground conditions. Now, I mentioned London River. The Shard is also very close to this river, and we have about 50 meters of clay. And clay is quite a changeable material. So when it's wet, it sort of shrinks down a little bit when it sorry, the other way around, when it's wet, it expands. When it's dry, it shrinks. And so there's this movement, this seasonal change that happens. So we really needed to think about that. So in the case of buildings that aren't that tall, you would be able to put a raft foundation in so big concrete slab, and you can place the building on top of it, and it sort of stays, you know, good enough, stable enough, but with the type of loads we were talking about with The Shard that just simply wouldn't have done the job. So what we needed to do was to make sure that our piled foundations were bearing or sitting on top of a very compressed, strong layer of what we call the Thanet sands. So if you imagine putting your finger on a table and pressing down on it, the table is just sort of receiving all that force that you're chucking onto it, and that's what the Thanet sans are doing for The Shard. So there's lots of different systems that have to work together to make sure that a big skyscraper stays stable. But also, yeah, does it doesn't settle or settle unevenly, because we definitely didn't want the leading tower of Shard to be happening.

Dusty Rhodes 07:20
And are there special considerations when you're building beside a river, there must be

Roma Agrawal 07:25
So the waterproof thing is, is very, very important. The groundwater is, is changeable, but it's pretty high, and we were definitely going meters and meters below the water table. So the pressure that the water table is putting onto the walls of the foundation increases as you go deeper and deeper. So not only do we need to make sure that we're holding the ground up and that the ground is not going to move too much, because that ground around The Shard was carrying a train station, a bus station, a hospital and all the numerous other buildings that live around London, there's a tube line not too far away. So we don't want that ground to move too much, and we need to keep the water out. So we had actually, you know, a few different layers of waterproofing redundancy to make sure that, yeah, even if water trickles did come in, there's a place for that to drain away.

Dusty Rhodes 08:18
And what about interacting with other people? Because, you know, you mentioned that there's a tube station other major facilities nearby. Did you have to interact directly with them to find out kind of the way those facilities were designed and to see what it was that you could and you could not do, or were you just kind of going it should be like this? And I imagine the former. Yeah,

Roma Agrawal 08:39
definitely the former. And people often ask me what my biggest challenge of working on The Shard was, and I think that's the answer, really is, you know, managing and working with all these different stakeholders, as we call them. And I spent nearly two years of my time on The Shard doing that, and that is one of the least glamorous bits of the project. So, you know, I did that. Then I did the foundations, which are super, really important, and then I did the pretty bit at the top, which I'm sure we'll talk about. But yes, in dealing with stakeholders, you know, we want to build this building. We want to make sure it's safe, and all the people around us want to make sure that their structures Stay safe, and that's a perfectly legitimate requirement. What was complicated in this case was how many different stakeholders we had. And I mean, that is fairly usual for, you know, big city sites. I think the scale of this building made everyone, perhaps a little bit more cautious, you know, again, rightly so, really looking at all the risks involved. So yeah, so we interacted with all these different stakeholders. And one of the things that I remember we did was we put about 1500 prisms, little ones all around the construction site, inside buildings, inside train stations, inside tube tunnels, and we had lasers pointing. At these prisms that and they caught, you know, they logged the x, y, z coordinates of all these, these prisms. And then, as we were digging the foundation, we were monitoring how much each of these points were moving, and we also had a prediction of how much we thought they would move, which was done by some very clever geotechnical engineers, and we had to keep an eye, you know, there was a system in place that if the movement on a prism went above what we expected, then there would be a ping, and we would need to go and check if this was okay. Is it going to recover? What's happening? And so that was interesting. I think there was a couple of people in my team, luckily, not me, that got a text message every time there was a ping. I don't think that would have been a very relaxing time for them.

Dusty Rhodes 10:53
Moving away from the foundation and kind of just thinking about going up the building literally. Can you tell us a little bit more, in a little bit more detail about the vertical and the horizontal forces which affect the overall stability of a skyscraper,

Roma Agrawal 11:07
sure. So it's the same as any other building or bridge that you might be dealing with, so wind and gravity. So you were lucky that in the UK, we don't need to design for earthquake loads, because that obviously makes things far more complicated. So we're primarily looking at wind and gravity, and we look at what's called accidental loads. So, you know, in the 1960s there was a building called Ronan point which suffered quite a bad collapse because a gas cylinder exploded in one of the flats. So we're looking at, you know, unusual loads like that. And then we're looking at ground movement, you know, how much is the ground going to shift and move underneath the building? We looked a little bit at temperature as well. So particularly for the spire, which is the very top of the building, because that was all exposed steel, we did a short, you know, little check on, well, how hot might the steel get, and how cold might it get, and, you know, how much might it therefore expand or contract into different seasons. But we didn't really find that there was much of an impact there. What's interesting to me, particularly, you know, I was a graduate engineer when I started on that project, was we have all these codes and regulations that we're using to design the building, but for the wind side of it, that stops at 100 meters and The Shard is 300 meters tall. So what normally happens is that, you know, there's two options. One is that you can do a software analysis of different wind loads. What we did was to get a specialized company to create. I think it was a one to 400 scale model of The Shard filled with wires and lots and lots of sensors on all the different faces of it. It's put onto a turntable and it's put into a wind tunnel. So in a similar way that you might test an f1 car to see how the wind or the air is aerodynamically flowing across this piece of engineering. We did the same to The Shard. So we twisted that turntable in 32 different positions around the circle. And we checked, is it 32 or 36 I don't know one of the two Well, 360 degrees,

Dusty Rhodes 13:16
so might be 36 every 10 degrees?

Roma Agrawal 13:18
Yeah, I was thinking about that. And then we basically measured what the wind forces were on the different faces of the building. And again, the taller you go, the higher and the more complex the wind forces can get. So we needed to check how much we expected the whole building to sway or to move under the worst case storm for 100 years. But we also needed to check that individual panels of glass didn't experience so much suction or pressure that they would crack. So we're looking at the wind on all these different scales,

Dusty Rhodes 13:58
and does the wind vary a lot? As you say, that means 300 meters tall. Does the wind vary a lot from, I would imagine it's different from at the top than what it will be at the ground. But are there many variations as you go up?

Roma Agrawal 14:12
So I mean, overall, you would get a fairly steady increase as you're going up. But that increase, the rate of that increase can increase so it can get sort of stronger and stronger and stronger a bit more suddenly, the the further up you get. And this is particularly important for the design of the spire again, which is, you know, the very top bit of the tower where you we had The Shards, you know, which is where the building gets its name. So these are big, long, cantilevered, so sort of free standing bits of steel and glass, which are essentially unsupported, and they're quite vulnerable to this deflection, to the movement that can happen from the fairly strong wind loads.

Dusty Rhodes 14:55
So what is holding them in place? Because you said it's not connected. It to the building. So

Roma Agrawal 15:00
I often describe it as a vertical diving board, or a diving board at a slight angle. So you've fixed one the bottom end of it, and then the other bit is, is flexible. And in this case, our diving board was made up of a steel frame. So we do have, you know, steel columns there. And we love triangles. You know, engineers, I've got a tattoo of a triangle on my finger. It's a really important shape in structural engineering. So we've created some triangular what we call trusses to try and help keep that stable, and then the glass is attached to that. So what we could do, in this case, particularly for that very top section, is make sure that the joints between the glass could take a little bit more movement than they needed to take elsewhere in the building. So we kind of anticipated that, yes, it will move more. There's more wind load, but let's design that in and make sure that the glass panels will be okay. So it's all sort of taken into account and put in there, into the design I've

Dusty Rhodes 16:00
heard with a couple of skyscrapers, especially when the group told they can actually move, like a number of inches, or even a number of feet, when, when it is particularly windy, is it the same as a shard?

Roma Agrawal 16:11
Absolutely. So I think children and also any grown ups that that aren't engineers, are always totally gobsmacked when I tell them that all structures move and that The Shard sways. So a building like The Shard, we predict might move about half a meter. So so it's not a huge amount, really for a tall building, but yes, it sways. What's key as a structural engineer is to make sure that we don't feel that. So if you think about when you're on an airplane, you're clearly traveling very fast, but if there's no turbulence, and you're just going at a steady speed, you don't feel like you're moving. However, when there's turbulence, you really feel it, because that's a sudden change in the speed that you're going, so you're kind of being buffeted, and so we just need to make sure that the building's not going to be buffeted in that way, that you know the accelerations that the human experiences in the building will be below a certain level, so you don't feel it in your gut. You don't feel seasick.

Dusty Rhodes 17:15
And tell me more about the spire, because it is possibly the part of the building that is most exposed to the elements and the most difficult to get at. How in your design were you thinking about combating corrosion and fatigue? Yeah, those are

Roma Agrawal 17:30
great questions. There was so many different things we have to think about. So we've talked a lot about the wind. Fatigue is a really interesting one. So fatigue is, again, for the non engineers out there, if you repeat the same motion again and again and again and again and again, then metal suffers from what we call fatigue and breaks what we so we did look at the fatigue for the spire. Fatigue is incredibly important on roads and in airplanes as two examples, because the number, so we look at the number of cycles, what is the number of times

Dusty Rhodes 18:05
that an aircraft takes off in lands? Yeah,

Roma Agrawal 18:07
yeah. And also, it's the wings. When it's being buffeted in the air, you have these, like, continuous, you know, massive cycles of the same joints being being subjected to fatigue. It's actually not the same in a skyscraper, because the wind forces on generally not that high. And then you have the odd storm, and then you have the odd very bad storm. You don't get the same number of cycles that you would for, say, an aircraft or for trucks driving over the same joint in a bridge. So we looked at it and figured out that actually, it's not going to be a problem here, but we still make sure that the grade of the steel we're using, the strength of the steel, you know, what mixtures it has in it, exactly what its composition is, is conducive to being exposed, first of all to the elements, but also being exposed to these cycles of movement. So it's all painted to, you know, with layers of paint that are specifically designed for being outdoors, and that, you know, will require a little bit of maintenance and touch up every 25 to 30 years. Go have a check see what's going on. But yeah,

Dusty Rhodes 19:20
I was, I'm fascinated to know how you get guys or ladies or people up there to maintain the spire. And it fascinates me in that I'm a radio guy. So I see these antennas, and there's always a light at the top of these 300-metre antennas, and I always go, who changes the bulb,

Roma Agrawal 19:43
not me. I can tell you that I do not like heights, which is ironic. I know don't like don't like heights. I very clearly remember actually climbing up from so it was level 69 to level 72 on a ladder. This was before the lifts and the stairs had gone in. Yeah. Yeah, and I don't think I've ever been more scared in my life. And I got to the top, and this was even before all the glass had gone in, so obviously there was lots of safety netting and all the things. But I got up there and I told the guy, I said, mate, I'm not coming down until the stairs are installed, because I'm just gonna sit here. How long is it gonna take? In a few months? Fine, I'm here for I'm here for the long run. Sorry, so you were saying about so what was really interesting, so it was not only the maintenance of the spire, but actually building the spire, right? Because you're sending people up quite high to do up bolts and nuts and bolts and get bits of steel in, and then the glass and everything. A lot of them are rock climbers or some sort of adrenaline junkie that train to fix steel so that they can basically get paid to do what they love. And isn't that just isn't that crazy? And I love that, because it's not the other way around. It's not the steel. I mean, sometimes, of course, it is that the steel fixes get trained up to go up and do these things at height. But it's also people going, I love, I love being hanging up from a harness 300 meters up in the air. Yeah, teach me how to do nuts and bolts and I'll go get paid for it. Yeah, not me. There's not enough money in the world for that.

Dusty Rhodes 21:13
Tell me, do you know much about the big now, you're the expert, but at the very top of the building and at the very bottom of the building, but the in between bit the actual building itself. I mean, there's offices and there's a hotel and there's apartments and everything in that. Do you know how each of those spaces influenced the choice of materials that was used? Yeah,

Roma Agrawal 21:32
absolutely. So I did spend one summer designing the steel beams for the office floor. Again, one of the less glamorous parts, I do have to say, the least glamorous thing I designed for The Shard, or you could say the most, was some steel to support marble urinals in the hotel. So you heard it here first, maybe not first, but you've had it here. So the yes, the different materials we used in the different bits of The Shard was actually quite an unusual thing to do. So most skyscrapers have a single use, so they're either offices or their hotels or their apartments. And then there are some big, mega skyscrapers around the world that do what The Shard does, which is a mix of all the above. Now, what we normally do in the UK is we use steel beams with a little concrete topping slab for Office floors, because you have bigger head, you know, headspace above you, the steel beams have holes in them, and offices require lots of ducts, so whether that's for cables and for, you know, air conditioning, for water and so on. And the second thing is that offices don't really need as much daylight. I guess you could have bigger floor plates, and there are bits which are farther away from windows, and that's kind of okay, whereas, if you're building an apartment building or a hotel, you want daylight, you want windows on every flat on or every room that you're dealing with, so that they tend to be smaller floor plates. First of all, they don't have as many services. You don't need as many ducts and so on. And you want good acoustic separation. So you don't want sound to be transmitting from one level to the next. So you tend to just go for a concrete slab. And what that does is it reduces how much space each floor takes up. So just to give you some numbers, for the office floors in The Shard, we they were 3.65 meters, if I remember correctly, because I am going back over a decade, whereas for the concrete floors for the hotel, it was around 3.2 meters, or 3.4 meters. So you've basically reducing you can squeeze more floors in essentially, you know, as you stack them up. So, so that's what we did. So we said, Well, if that's what we would have done in a separate building, why don't we do that on The Shard? So the office floors are lower down in the building, where the floor plates are bigger and they're made of steel, and then you go higher up, floor plates are smaller, they're made of concrete, and that's where the hotel goes. So just kind of actually very logical. When

Dusty Rhodes 24:05
it's explained to you, it's very logical. I hadn't, I hadn't thought about that before. Roma, you weren't the only one to work on The Shard. I'm just wondering, like, how

Roma Agrawal 24:14
many who told you otherwise,

Dusty Rhodes 24:18
you gave it away, or you said I'm not going to bow floor 76 tell me how many people in all Do you know? Did it take? Yeah,

Roma Agrawal 24:28
I mean, I only joke because, you know, it's obvious that engineers work in teams, and you can't do anything without 1000s of people in the case of The Shards. So you know, a lot of again, when I talk to young people, and even when I think about it myself, the complexity of the number of people with the different expertise that get involved in the building is kind of mind blowing. So I was in a team of structural engineers, which varied between, say, eight and 15 of us. Okay, so relatively small team. Then you had mechanical engineers. Electrical engineers, public health engineers. So you had all these engineers. Then you had all the architects, and there were two different practices working on it. And there was dozens of them. You had the quantity surveyors that look at the cost for everything. You have the contractors, obviously, that are building. And there were hundreds of them. There's the client, the developers, the hotel people, the office tenants. I mean, it just snowballs when you really think about how many people are involved. And then, of course, all the interiors, like, you know, the designing of all of that, and all the people working on site. So it was, you know, literally 1000s of people. And, yeah, I mean, for me, it was a once in a lifetime experience. I guess for most engineers working on a project like that, is a, is really a once in a lifetime experience?

Dusty Rhodes 25:44
Is that because of the building and the iconic design of it, or is it just sheer size of it that made it a once in a lifetime experience? Yeah,

Roma Agrawal 25:53
I think it's both. I think it's working with the team at Renzo Piano. You know, working with such incredible architects is is rare for so many. Well, such famous, big name, international architects can be quite rare. And yeah, we, I mean, it was a high stakes project in a way, and we had a very clear deadline that the outside of the building needed to be finished for the 2012 Olympics opening ceremony as well. So, so there was a bit of pressure on that as well.

Dusty Rhodes 26:22
Listen, let me ask you about because you said the amount of other consultants and architects and engineers that you're working with, and obviously you have to get on with people and all that kind of stuff. But for you, how did working with that number of people impact the design?

Roma Agrawal 26:37
So the way I think about it, so first of all, as a student, I don't think I ever understood how essential the skill of being able to work with other people is to be an engineer, and I think that's changed in the education since I was studying. So I think they're doing more group projects. They're doing more interdisciplinary projects at university to give students a taste of that I didn't have that to the same extent. So I came into work and went what, you know, I did a small project first, which was a very small team, and I think that was really good for me to just get, get my hands in, understand the engineering, the technical side, and have a bit of experience working with all other people. And then going onto The Shard was, you know, the other end of the scale, really, and it is absolutely crucial that you understand how to work with other people. You know, we were talking about some of the challenges on The Shard, so, yes, one of the big challenges working with all these different consultants is that everybody's got their own perspective on how, on what they need for the building and how to solve the problems. Okay? And I think what we have to keep reminding ourselves of is that we all have the same end goal. We all want this building to be built, and we want it to work well, okay, so, so that's the sort of umbrella under which we're all operating. And then within that, the structural engineers want to have nice, straight, consistent steel beams. The mechanical engineer wants lots of holes in my beams, not, you know, they're not my beams, in our beams to put the ducts through. And then, you know, the electrical engineer wants something else. And the quantity surveyors are saying, That's too expensive. What can we do to try and make this a little bit cheaper? The architects are saying, how do we make these nuts and bolts up in the spire look absolutely brilliant, the contractors are saying, but we need to build it safely. So I think, because it was The Shard, and we all really, really, really, were very motivated to make sure it was a great product. I actually think, you know, I'm not just saying this, we did work really well together. We had and also, I think the other thing that made a difference is we, because it was such a long project, and there were so many years spent on it, you know, we were working together for years on end, which also can sometimes be unusual. We were an international team, so I loved all the different perspectives that brought you know, there were practices based on Canada in the Netherlands, in Paris, in London, in Hong Kong, everywhere. So overall, I think we did well.

Dusty Rhodes 29:12
Do you have any particular story that you remember that can explain how something arose and you all work together to fix it?

Roma Agrawal 29:20
So one that comes to mind is, is how we constructed the basement. So we talked about the time scales that we were working to. So, you know, we've got this deadline. Cost, obviously, is always the forefront of everyone's mind, because budgets are really, really important, because you can't build a building if you just carry on increasing costs. And then we were also thinking about the ground movement, which we've discussed a little bit or a lot, and what we ended up doing so the structural engineers, the contractors and the quantity surveyors, the project managers, came together and said, you know, how can we build this building, or the base basement in particular, in a way that will help lead. Create some of these risks, you know. So we have this risk register with big red things going ground, movement, timescales, budgets, you know, how can we actually bring these and, you know, get some creativity out of it. And what we did was a method called top down construction. So that means we're building downwards and upwards at the same time. So in very, very short, we actually essentially built the ground floor slab first, and then we left a hole and dug underneath the base, you know, underneath the ground floor slab, while we started building upwards at the same time. And I, you know, I can spend an hour just explaining how that was done, so I'll spare you, but the upshot was that that technique had never been used before in a building of this size, and definitely not to construct the core of the building, which is the central spine of the building. And this required a lot of work between the structural engineers, project managers and the contractors to say, how can we logistically make this work in a way that's buildable safely to the budgets and time constraints, but that doesn't compromise the stability and the structure as you're doing it?

Dusty Rhodes 31:15
I want to move away from The Shard and just talk about kind of engineering and engineers in general, because, like, the team and the amount of people you said that were involved with that, and the quality of them and from all over the world, and you were, like, right in the center of that amazing. And then when you look at that, I mean, it is a feat of human engineering, you know, and any of those iconic buildings around the world are, why is it that we do not, in our society have engineers who are like rock stars? Do you know what I mean? It's kind of like, you know, kind of you two will go, Yeah, whatever bloody blood album was, that was our latest thing, you know. Why don't we look at The Shard and go, you know, such and such a person did that?

Roma Agrawal 31:58
Because, I guess one of the big reasons, which we've just discussed, is that it's not just one person that's done that, right? Like there is such a huge, massive team that gets involved in it. So you tend to have the starchitects, as they're called. So we might know Renzo Piano was the architect, or we might know Norman Foster built this other thing, or David Chipperfield built that. So we tend to know the names of the architects more. But again, they work in huge teams, and again, it's never one person that's created something. So I think, I think there's that, I think culturally, something has really shifted, particularly in the UK. If you think 250 years ago with the Victorian engineers, you know, Brunel was a rock star. I'm not sure he was the nicest of men from what I hear, but he was certainly a rock star in the sense that people knew who he was, and he was very good at PR, from what what we can understand by today's standards, you know, he knew the politicians. He knew funders. He went out there, got fancy pictures taken of himself and invited famous people to the opening of things that he did, or particular thing so he knew how to play the game as it were, and then we seem to have lost that at some point. And it's a very complicated I don't know if anyone really fully understands why that's the case, but I grew up in India, so I spent 10 years of my very formative childhood there, and being an engineer, there is the thing people aspire, or definitely parents aspire for their kids to become now,

Dusty Rhodes 33:27
let me ask you about that. Would you say that it's the same in the in the UK, that parents aspire for their kids to become engineers? Or it's absolutely

Roma Agrawal 33:36
not, no, no. So there's a bit cultural difference.

Dusty Rhodes 33:39
Is it? Is it just the money where they go? Ah, engineering, good money in that, or is there something else behind it?

Roma Agrawal 33:45
I mean, it can't be that simple, because engineers can make decent money in the UK as well, and it's a good steady job and and, you know, technology is always flying forward and all of this. So it can't just be that. One of my theories is, growing up in India, your science education is more emphasized, whereas I think in the UK, it can be the other way around. So I always loved math, science, physics. That was like, yeah, that's that's fine. That's normal. And actually, you know, potentially to the detriment of history and English and literature and so on. So I studied all that stuff, but I don't think I was ever massively inspired by it, and so I barely did any writing until I was in my 30s. So and I think over here, it's sort of the other way around. I think maybe perhaps it's a rapidly developing country, India. So you see roads being built, buildings being built, bridges going up. And so you understand that, Oh, wow. You know, there's engineers responsible for making these big changes to our lives, whereas in the UK, I think we generally see it as being noisy and a nuisance construction, which can be no doubt. And the thing that I always say is the only time I ever hear the word engineering art in public. Think is when your train is delayed because of engineering work. So there's not a nice connotation to that. I think, yeah, it's, I mean, it's a complicated cultural situation. And then, you know, we could talk about the whole gender thing, which is a whole other topic that,

Dusty Rhodes 35:17
listen, it just amazes me, because everybody's going on about, you know, kind of engineering, and they can't get enough engineers yet. You know, the whole industry is so male dominated. It's like, imagine if you just had the same amount of women coming into the business. Then we'd have more engineers than, well, maybe not that we need, but we'd certainly have plenty of them. But I think it's interesting what you say about India being a fast growing country, and there's a lot of construction and everything going on around you, do you think maybe it's a case then of you cannot be what you cannot see. So when you were growing up, you were seeing all of these constructions going up and engineers putting it all together and figuring out all the problems. And because of that, it made more sense to you to get into

Roma Agrawal 35:59
it, possibly. But it's also just talked about more in everyday life. And in fact, what you'll find in India is that there are comedians or actors or artists or dancers who said, Oh, yeah, my parents forced me to become an engineer. Made me do engineering, and then I've my rebellion is to get away from that and become a comedian or something, whereas it's almost the opposite here, where, you know, the rebellious thing, especially for a girl, to do, is to become an engineer. So it's all it's very cultural. I think that's an important thing to remember. And somebody told me, and I think this is correct, that 70% of computer science or computer engineering. Software Engineering undergraduates in Iran are women. If you go to places like Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, there are a lot of women studying maths and physics and so on. So it's a cultural thing. I have a little girl who's now five, and when she was a baby, I wanted to buy her digger onesies, like I wanted pictures of construction vehicles on on her clothes. So where did I have to go? I had to go to the boys section. So, you know, from the minute they're born, we've decided some kind of stereotype or part for them, and then where, you know, consciously and unconsciously filling their heads with that nonsense. No, when you

Dusty Rhodes 37:24
say that, that reminds me of my childhood, which was a long time ago, but I find it absolutely amazing, and not in a good way, that life is still like that. It's like little lady bird books. I want to be an engineer, and I bet you it's a blue color on the cover. Yes, that's just bananas. Listen, but affecting change. Okay, so you you've grown up in a different culture, and now you kind of overhear more Western European things. What would you say to engineers who are listening today? How can they change people's perceptions of engineering?

Roma Agrawal 37:57
I think just talk about your work in an excited way. I think being enthusiastic about what you do is a big thing. I think we're all too modest. I think, you know, we we say, oh, yeah, I just, I just did a little bit of work on this little thing. Yeah, I'm, you know, I'm this type of engineer. And we just, we just do little robots that may solve cancer one day or, you know, we don't really know, we're not really sure. I just think people should be, you know, they're passionate about their work, that's why they're doing it. So I would really love for engineers to share that passion, and that could just be with their families. It could be with young people in their lives. It could be with their children's schools. It could be people that they meet at a dinner party. I think just, first of all, just talking about engineering in everyday life is great. You know, we talk about books, don't we? We talk about music, talk about this as well.

Dusty Rhodes 38:46
Engineering. I picked up a little networking tip that I never thought would work, and I've put it in place since, and it works a treat, and it relates directly to what you've just said, and that is, when you're at an event or something, just kind of go you're talking, how you doing? Oh, yeah. So what's your name? Where are you working for? So what's the big problem wrecking your head this week? And it's amazing that people, oh, man, I'm working on this building, or they come out and they actually tell you, it's really interesting. So I think that's good. What you say about people with engineering, and you can kind of go, Matt, I had a really interesting problem this week because they gave me a lump of steel and they said, support this marble urinal. That kind of a way, like, you know. How did you do that? Like, you know, so, so, that kind of a way. Listen. Let me wrap up by asking you about a pivot, because all of this talk of engineering you've gotten out of the game. You terrible woman, you've decided to pivot. You're in a you've become a writer and a public speaker and a podcaster. Tell me. Tell me about the books that you've written. Yeah,

Roma Agrawal 39:53
I've unfortunately become that statistic of the woman in her mid 30s that has a child and quits her engineering job.

Dusty Rhodes 39:59
Ah. Yeah, is that? Is that why you do this? Because you said, I want more time and I want to be at home and family is more important for now?

Roma Agrawal 40:06
No, it's much more complicated than that, actually, because the pandemic had hit at the same time, and also I had written two books while I was working as an engineer, and I didn't think I could do pandemic new baby, write and be an engineer. I thought four things was a bit too much for me, so I said, I need to pick three of these things. So so the book, the writing, became the focus. And I said, I'll give myself a year, and it's now been five. So yeah, so I stopped the formal engineering practice five years ago, but I'm very much still in the world. So I've now published four books about engineering. Two of them are for adults, two of them are for children. They are aimed at the general audience. So when we were talking about engineers sharing excitedly what they've been doing, that all comes down to storytelling for me, and I think as somebody in radio, you'll know all about that. You know, we you know, how do you tell stories? How do you keep an audience script? How do you create that tension? Find beautiful, historical things that are relevant to people's lives today. And so my first book, which is called built, is about how we've built our world. You know, what are the stories that hide behind the structures that we can see all around us. So I've talked about how the ancient Chinese mixed sticky rice into their mortar to create a slightly more flexible mix, or how the ancient Romans created those watertight areas to create their foundations. And you know, we did that on a huge scale, on The Shard, and engineers love it, because we haven't studied history during our degrees, and what I've done is to give them an opportunity to dig into that, why things are the way they are now, and what are the social impacts of things. And non engineers just go, Wow, I love the history and all that stuff, but this science stuff's really fun as well. So built, then came out as how was that built for children? And then I started my most recent adult book, which is called nuts and bolts, just as the pandemic hit. And that's about seven small inventions that change the world. So, you know, tiny inventions that turn make our world work. So I really wanted to explore the very, very complex stories of simple things like the nail. So I have seven inventions that I picked, and I've explored them, and it's a very global book. And then, most recently, just a couple of months ago, the children's version of that came out, and that's called seven small inventions that changed the world. And I'm working on my next two as we speak.

Dusty Rhodes 42:40
Wow. And you also have done a podcast as well, which I listened to. And the reason I mentioned that is, well, as a podcaster, I have to compliment you and say that that is one of the highest qualities podcasts I've ever heard very few people tackle documentary and that storytelling thing, and you did it very well. But also the topic of the first episode of the podcast with Roma is The Shard, and she goes into a lot more detail about the building and how it was built. So we'll put more details on that in the show notes for you. Of course, if you'd like to find out more about Roma Agrawal and some of the topics that we spoke about today, you'll find notes, and we've got link details and LinkedIn and all that kind of stuff in the description area of the podcast as well for you. But for now, Roma, thank you so much for sharing so much with us today.

Roma Agrawal 43:24
Oh, it's been a total joy. Thank you for having me.

Dusty Rhodes 43:26
If you enjoyed our podcast today, please do share with a friend in the business. Just tell them to search for Engineers Ireland in their podcast player. The podcast is produced by dustpod.io for Engineers Ireland, for advanced episodes, more information on engineering or career development opportunities that there are libraries of information on the website engineersisland.ie. Until next time from myself, Dusty Rhodes. Thank you for listening.