Speech by SMS Desmond Lee at the 5th Structural Engineers World Congress (SEWC) 2015
Oct 20, 2015
ENGINEERING TOMORROW’S SOLUTIONS
Good morning. I am very delighted to join all of you here at the opening ceremony for the Structural Engineers World Congress 2015, and to many of our friends from around the world, a warm welcome to Singapore.
Challenges in the urban built environment
The key challenges for the urban built environment are similar worldwide. How do we develop our cities and infrastructure in a more green and sustainable manner? This is one challenge we face. How do we create a built environment that is resilient and durable and can withstand time and weather? These issues become even more stark with climate change and more frequent extreme weather events. Equally important is how we can raise the bar for our built environment, so that our cities and suburbs can be even more liveable and inclusive. How can we take into account all of these objectives, while meeting time and cost considerations that many clients will impress upon.
As engineers, you possess specialised knowledge and perspectives, as well as ideas and solutions. This Congress brings together many experts within the engineering community to push the boundaries of what is possible, to tackle important challenges that exist both today as well as in the future.
Need for innovative, yet practical, solutions
As the challenges have become even more complex, the engineering profession has responded by developing fields of specialised knowledge, such as sustainable engineering and development of green structures.
Good examples of green structures in Singapore are the Supertrees at the Gardens by the Bay, and I hope you will see it in the next couple of days, you would certainly have seen if you come by Changi and you approach the city. These are vertical gardens with planting panels that form tall ‘living’ structures of up to 50metres, providing daytime shade for visitors and night time light displays. Some of these Supertrees also have photovoltaic cells to harvest solar energy and act, in fact, as air exhausts for the conservatories because it is run on the waste wood that we collect from around the island, it fuels the furnace, steam then runs the turbine, and the waste air and steam is let through these Supertrees. They contribute to a sustainable energy system for the Gardens. On top of all this, they are aesthetically designed to fit their setting – as trees in a garden!
Singapore is a very small place, and because of that we are constantly looking out for solutions and trying out new methods to improve our built environment. Take for instance our HDB or Housing & Development Board flats, these are public housing that caters to the vast majority of Singaporean’s housing needs. HDB has adopted prefabrication technology to construct quality public housing developments more efficiently. Our Building Construction Authority, another statutory authority, is promoting more sustainable and productive building and construction, for example Design for Manufacturing and Assembly (DfMA) and Building Information Modelling (BIM). You will hear more from Mr Ong See Ho, our deputy CEO of BCA, who is one of the keynote speakers later. We are also supporting R&D in construction value chain integration using these methods.
Just a couple of days ago, I took part in what we call the Productivity Race. We get young students from our Polytechnics, from our Institutes of Technical Education, from our BCA Academy – once a year we get them energised about productivity, not through lectures or seminars by running with them in the race. At each pit-stop they would learn something new. For the first pit-stop, we were trying to build a CLT or Cross Laminated Timber structure. We had engineers all around and I was the only lawyer, and not being the most useful profession in the construction of the CLT structure, I satisfied myself by being a general construction worker to help them.
What really struck me was that our young engineers-to-be and our young technicians-to-be understand that with technology, with innovation, with a mind-set that you take nothing as given, and that every time you do something you ask yourself “how can I do my job well and do it even better and break boundaries using what I’ve learnt”. They recognise that the change that Singapore is pushing through in terms of our building and built environment sector, our embracing of virtual design and construction using BIM to literally walk through our construction and design before we even start the first piling work. While these things cause a bit of discomfort amongst the profession because we are used to a certain way of doing things, they actually create vast opportunity for young, educated Singaporeans to find jobs of value, to be able to innovate and to be able to be pioneers in the construction sector all over again. So that is really the spirit that we hope will emanate from this conference of experts and then transcend to all our students, to all our engineers and to all our technical people.
Because as engineers, all of you here play a leading role in pushing the boundaries of process as well as technology, but most importantly, mind-set. By applying your expertise, you can develop innovative, yet practical solutions for real problems that cities face. So I am very happy to learn that the papers that are being tabled at this Congress cover not just the mainstream structural engineering topics which are important, but also topics such as sustainable engineering, green structures, architecture in engineering design, as well as the use of technologies, such as BIM.
Together, we can be larger than the sum of our parts
There is tremendous value when engineers with specialist knowledge work closely together with other professions with complementary skillsets in a project team to propose innovative urban solutions. Increasingly, multi-disciplinary teams that extend beyond engineering are required to work closely and complement one another to provide integrated solutions. So for example I said earlier, about VDC – virtual design and construction, requiring the entire process chain working right up stream through BIM, integrating together, that is really the beginning of cross-disciplinary work coming together.
One physical manifestation of this is the new National Gallery Singapore on St Andrews Road, a short distance from this Congress venue so do take a walk if you have time later. The Gallery is housed in two national monuments, the former Supreme Court, where I used to work, as well as City Hall. A strong multi-disciplinary team including engineers, architects, and conservation experts worked very closely to realise the design concept. So that building has a new glass and metal roof canopy providing natural lighting, and new link bridges and a basement connecting the two monuments. The team had to overcome building and site constraints, meet requirements in the architectural conservation, and re-adapt the buildings for use as a museum and a gallery. What you see today is the outcome of this multi-disciplinary work.
This Congress provides an opportunity for you to share your ideas and showcase your research in the international arena, so that others can benefit from this collective wisdom, and cross-pollinate ideas and come up with better solutions.
I am glad that these exchanges will be sustained, as Singapore will be setting up a chapter of the Structural Engineers World Congress to establish a platform for the sharing of structural engineering research and applications. This bodes well for the engineering community in Singapore, to work with the international engineering community in our quest to come up with the engineering solutions for tomorrow.
Conclusion
I wish all of you a successful and fruitful Congress, and a very pleasant stay in Singapore. Thank you.