Light Weight………………….

Light weight………………….

When I was in my teenage I had a habit of reading each and every book which I don’t understand. I just read whatever available in the reach of my hand. Milan Kundera’s “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” was exposed to me during that time by mistake.

 I don’t know what I learn from it, but like Tomas in my early twenties I believed that sex and love to be distinct entities. Still I think some exceptional occasions it’s correct, but not with everyone. My understanding its very gender obsessed thinking. Mostly men consider sex and love is very distinct entities with very selfish grounds.

After reading “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” I did not feel any lightness. It was very confusing .Plus too heavy for mind I guess so.Dr Tomas, the womanizer what he is doing with wife? Even with that wretched dog? May be I was not mature enough to understand as well my  English not good enough  then I tried Sinhalese translation. Well to be honest it was the crappiest Sinhalese translation I have read in my whole life should I tell the translator as well? It was Mr .Gamini Wiyangoda.

But I must say movie was far better than the novel.It s because Daniel Day-Lewis's splendid performances.No wonder why he won Oscar awards for three times.For me the movie meant something than the book,

Do we ever able to feel lightness in life? Generally we are getting heavier and heavier with the age. We know our bones getting heavy with the age, then the mass.Those who very much figure conscious try various methods to obtain the light look of the body. Actually I tried some of common methods such as Yoga and heavy diet controlling I must say I was successful to some extend but what I lacking with me was continuation for a long run.

In architecture there is a very definite line between light looking buildings and heavy monumental buildings. There was a time in history the entire civilization was built over monumental heavy looking buildings. Pyramids in Egypt and South America still living proofs .Most cases rulers or kings, were   fascinated with heavy monuments and the people paid for it.Even in 21 st century this has not changed. Also it won’t change. It’s a statement to the leaders, they love it. The great civilization of the history such as Inca tried unbearable constructions of heavy pyramids and it caused of the collapsing indirectly.

History does not teach lessons to everyone.so we can see this mistakes are repeating more or less everywhere.

In Modern architecture there were very few architects were brave enough to raised monumental buildings and succefully ended .Out of all the first name coming to my mind is Architect Louis Khan. Architect Louis Khan actually lived in a with an unbearable lightness but designed monumental buildings to the poorest nations of the world. 

When the time the Bangladesh parliament was constructing the country was extremely poor. It’s was manual labor power and bamboo scaffolding. 

 Notable works of Louis Khan were monumental heavy looking buildings. 

But I must say Architect Louis Khan's life  had the" Unbearable Lightness of Being" through out his death.Those who watched his son's documentary  about his father will agree with  me."My Architect: A Son's Journey" by by his son Nathaniel Kahn, detailing the architect's extraordinary career and his familial legacy after his death in 1974.

The modern architecture mostly encourages light look of the building.to obtain this as architect we use various material. The light weight concrete relatively expensive material in the construction industry.

 

The use of LWC (Lightweight concrete) has been a feature in the construction industry for centuries, but like other material the expectations of the performance have raised and now we are expecting a consistent, reliable material and predictable characteristics.

Structural LWC has an in-place density (unit weight) on the order of 90 to 115 lb / ft³ (1440 to 1840 kg/m³) compared to normal weight concrete a density in the range of 140 to 150 lb/ft³ (2240 to 2400 kg/m³). For structural applications the concrete strength should be greater than 2500 psi (17.0 MPa). The concrete mixture is made with a lightweight course aggregate. In some cases a portion or the entire fine aggregates may be a lightweight product. Lightweight aggregates used in structural lightweight concrete are typically expanded shale, clay or slate materials that have been fired in a rotary kiln to develop a porous structure. Other products such as air-cooled blast furnace slag are also used. There are other classes of non-structural LWC with lower density made with other aggregate materials and higher air voids in the cement paste matrix, such as in cellular concrete.

In 1984, Thomas A. Holm estimated that there were over 400 LWC bridges throughout the world especially in USA and Canada. The research carried out by The Expanded Clay and Slate Institute proves that most of the bridges appeared to be in good condition.

The architect Santiago Calatrava has a reputation of using light looking concrete in many of his projects. He designed bridges like sculptures.Those are extremely beautiful infrastructures. But very few countries can only think of building such great pieces. Those are so expensive.

Actually th

e site where I work we have some structural light weight concrete proposals and during the month of December I spent most of my time to complete the details drawings and finally ended up with successful story. Those are very small scale light weight concrete geometries. But it was not a light job…….