[fish hawk]

Speaking as just a lowly lifetime carpenter, once again you see the idiocy of high paid architects in action. One would think that who ever designed this dome would have taken in snow lode. For crying out loud, it's Minnesota people. You figure the heaviest snow in past history and than project that sometime in the future, it might get a worse storm and build it to those specifications. My whole life as a carpenter has lead me to the conclusion that Architects have wet dreams and then put them down on paper. I was once given a difficult assignment to build but the details on the print were not specific. I built it using common sense and later the architect stopped by and actually said to me: I wondered how you were going to do that. Yeah, it came out nice. true story.

[sinanju]

I was under the impression that architects came up with beautiful visions and engineers had to figure out how to make them stand up and not leak.

Of course the main factor was the budget and how many corners had to be cut.

[Chickensoup]

My dad was an oil pump engineer.

At the company he worked at there were plans for tollbooths for a thru-way and the teams could not make the oil pumps work to heat them.

The architects specs were for pumps about 20 times what was needed. Dad figured every little opportunity to increase that 10% bottom line that goes to the design firm.

He also believed that architecture as a career was for the kids in UMC families who could not bear to have little Johnny become a guy with a truck.

[Fred Hayek]

A lot of architects unfortunately did not do well in the structures classes (mechanics of materials, strength of materials), or conveniently forgot them once they graduated. Frank Lloyd Wright was an example of an architect who was absolutely clueless regarding structural loading. Architecture should be taught as a branch of civil engineering, and should be required to pass the Fundimentals of Engineering exam (used to be part 1 of the PE exam) as part of their licensing requirements. Even as a BS Electrical Engineering, I had to take Strength of Materials as a graduating requirement, and that subject matter is covered on the exam.