Martin Manning Martin Manning is a Structural Engineer. He joined Ove Arup & Partners in 1968 on graduating and he has been there ever since. He has worked in the firm’s offices in London, Zambia, Iran and Hong Kong and on projects around the world. His projects include: · Renault Centre, Swindon · Stansted Airport Terminal Building · Chek Lap Kok Terminal Building, Hong Kong · Inchon International Airport terminal Building, Seoul South Korea · Flughafenkopf, Unique Airport, Zurich, Switzerland · Offices for Daiwa at 88 Wood Street London · Commerzbank Headquarters, Frankfurt · British Embassy, Moscow · City Art Gallery, Manchester · Maritime Museum, Osaka · Blackfriars Station, London He has just started work on the new Terminal for Beijing Airport for the Olympics in 2008. He is a member of IABSE and a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering.

"...there’s physics and then everything else is stamp collecting."

On nearly every project I have worked on, the structure has only been a part of the whole. As such it has had to meet a number of conflicting criteria.

None of us aspire to merely good, or even best practice; what we want to do is to make a difference.

But, as a Structural Engineer working in the context of the whole, how should one set out to do that?

What does the structure have to do? Carry load? Save energy? Add a sense of scale?

What informs its shape? Gravity? Behaviour? Construction processes? Appearance?

What is the Engineer to do? Refine by analysis or by design?

How much do experiences gained on one project inform subsequent ones?

What I will try to do is to describe some of the, perhaps more structural, projects I have worked on to see if there are any identifiable Selfish Genes.