Restoration of the Royal Pavilion, Brighton: the Minarets and Storm Damage

Steel connections - who should design them? We have had a number of responses to this subject, as raised in our column on 16 October. Mr J. Renshaw, of Sale, Cheshire, strongly endorses some of the points that were made: Mr R. E. Densley has raised a question of great importance which, if not considered in depth, can cause many problems on a contract. Verulam

The results of a pilot series of tests, designed to investigate the influence of the presence of a composite floor slab on the performance of steel beam-to-column connections, are reported. Direct comparisons against equivalent bare steel tests show improvements in moment capacity (up to 15 times), with reinforcement anchorage being the main controlling factor. Thus joints to internal columns where the deck runs parallel to the beams and relatively small numbers of bars supplement the basic mesh reinforcement may be expected to give the best performance. J.B. Davison, D. Lam and Professor D.A. Nethercot

In the early part of this century, when the Institution was founded and later incorporated, the design and construction of buildings was carried out in circumstances very different to those that prevail today. Labour was plentiful, capital was relatively cheap, and materials were relatively expensive. As a profession, our preoccupation then was to develop and produce designs using the minimum amount of material and leaving management to others. This objective is today of relatively less importance, although it does still remain a preoccupation with many structural engineers. J.B. Creer and Ron Marsh