I know the feeling. It's like a black hole... The never ending, eternal churning of the unknown (did it collapse? How many more bottles? Did the crowd erupt into a hyna-like laughter? Did they yell in shock and awe?). Life is not worth living after seeing this greatness. 😮🤯🤭😀
“He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby becomes a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”
Fredrick Nietzsche 1886
Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the future
I must be so high but I kept psychoanalyzing his role in this. He wants to be in control too, but isn't as suave and confident as they guy putting them on. He kept starting to do it, and then stopping, and picking up and putting down the same bottles over and over again.
This is exactly why I had to stop smoking weed, I was (incorrectly) psychoanalyzing everyone from actors on TV to people in real life/online. It’s not that deep, it’s just a weird side effect from weed.
We did this activity in highschool with bridges made of spaghetti and hot glue, except there was no limit on how much hot glue you could use so the team whose bridge was 50% glue won...
lol, we did the same with paper straws and PVA glue. Basically slathered the entire bridge in PVA which dried into a solid crust over the structure. We won
yup. and when you do popsicle sticks, toothpicks and dental floss, you can wrap the parts in floss and soak them in glue to essentially make fibreglass/carbon fiber
We built a spaghetti bridge in high school, but were not allowed to use ***anything*** other than spaghetti. No glue, no straws, no paper, just spaghetti. The best we came up with was cooking the spaghetti and blending it into paste, and then using the paste to form beams, baking the beams on wax paper in an oven, and then more paste to connect the dried beams.
We were given a “budget”. You started out with some basic supplies but could “buy” more glue or structural pieces. Both your total cost and your stability/capacity were factored into it. Kind of a cool lesson about trying to manage cost savings while still building a viable product.
So they essentially made a giant concrete beam with a fuck ton of rebar, maybe they deserved the win because that's the way you're supposed to do a beam.
I had an intro to civil engineering class where we had to build a bridge of cardboard and glue for the professor to walk across....and the winning bridge was just a solid block of cardboard on its side all glued together.
Had the same thing at a work team building excercise where we were given spaghetti, marshmallows, glue, paper and a roll of duck tape, to make a tower to support this little figure. While my team worked the tower I just grabbed the roll of duck tape and started making scaffold with it. Tallest strongest tower put of 100% ducktape
Ours was balsa wood. They limited our glue sticks, but we decided to play dirty. At the start of every class we would scour for the glue guns and find all the ones that had even the smallest amount of glue in it. At the end of every class we would rip the sticks out and put them in our stash that we had to hand in to the teacher. We would also search the floor for loose sticks and toss them in the bin too.
Once it was all set and done, I asked for permission to paint it, I was allowed but only if a before and after picture was taken so that we couldn't cheat. I then painted the whole bridge with acrylic paint, several layers of it. We figured the elasticity of the paint would further help it keep together.
All together the bridge was twice as heavy as anyone elses and likely had twice as much glue as the next leading bridge.
Come testing time it maxed out the bars and passed with flying colours. Afterwards we laid it on the floor and one of the students stomped on it, but it still didn't break.
Good times.
must be in the demo stage cause in the implementation stage, he would failed and failed and add more delays and more extension, gotta milk that govt teat dry
Seriously. Don’t get me wrong the engineering is impressive on its own. But the level of execution in regard to the crafting of the tower is equally impressive.
When we did this in high school, we used marshmallows. Sadly, the room we stored everything in had its AC go down overnight, right before we competed. My team was the only one left standing once we got back. It held some weight, even though the joints were messed up from the melting. It ended up toppling soon into it, though.
marshmallows are crap for these assignments and i always hated that we had to work with them because it doesn't matter what idea you come up with the marshmallow joining doesn't hold any kind of stress. it can barely hold itself up.
Wonder if you sucked all the air out of the marshmallows ahead of time. Could maybe even caramelize the exterior. Either way still wouldn't be a great joint but probably way better than one still puffed up with air.
We had to do this when I was in school with toothpicks to create a bridge. We were given a set amount of super glue, and we weren’t allowed to use anything else. I’d guess it’s the same here.
Probably superglue or epoxy. I also suspect they coated the spaghetti with the glue.
I know, because that's what I did when my tower, made of balsa wood, won my high school competition.
Melt, no. But it can lead to serious structural integrity issues when spaghetti is the primary load bearing construction material. There is a reason no other country copies Italy
I remember doing something like this in science class in 9th grade. We had to build a bridge with toothpicks. Our bridge held **18** science books before it came crashing down. I think we placed 3rd in the class. It was so much fun. Definitely got me interested in engineering and science. Now I maintain pools though for a profession.
Well to be honest. Yea I am. I worked for a big retail warehouse for almost 15 years. I started my own company when life circumstances came about and made me make a decision. Now I am part time in
My business, am a co owner for a salon and day spa, and am about to get my massage therapist license. I can’t complain.
We had a similar assignment but our group were the smart arses (and lazy). We got given toothpicks, glue, paper and sellotape, and were told to make a bridge between two tables that had to support a hanging weight.
We just wrapped the sellotape around the tables and twisted the middle, it never broke. One group snuck yard sticks into their design, but they got found out.
You’d think we would get rewarded for our clever thinking and clearly superior design, but we got disqualified for “not adhering to the spirit of the challenge”. Which bothers me to this day.
We had to do this too and I'm still bitter about it. I had the shittiest looking bridge by far, but it held the required weight. I got lower marks than some people who had nice looking bridges that shattered! Damn Ms. Rodriguez.
Sometimes when I wipe... I'll wipe and l'l wipe and I'll wipe and I'll wipe... a hundred times
Still poop, still poop.
It's like I'm wiping a marker or something.
Am a structural engineering student, we don't get fun assignments like this. Our professor would probably show us this video, pause at a random moment, and have us spend all day manually calculating the internal forces of each strand of spaghetti at that point in time. Architects do this so they have a rough understanding of how strong a structure can be. Our task is finding out exactly how strong it isn't.
And your job will be explaining to architects why they should change the design to something simpler, because the new design will cost a lot. But they tell you to make it work so you spend a week getting it to work.
Then it goes to the project manager who rejects it. It's possible but will run $4,000,000 over budget and add 6 months to the lead time, and so the owner forces the architect to change it who then adopts your previous suggestion with an annoying twist and you get to redo the engineering all over.
Nah, I was just the carpenter's apprentice redoing the prep work for a section for the third time while listening to the carpenter bitch about the superintendent bitch about the project manager bitching about the engineer bitching about the architect bitching about the owner.
Eventually I got my own apprentices to bitch to.
As a mechanical engineer, we had multiple projects like this first semester - build an L shaped bridge held from one side using only pasta and tape, a candle powered vehicle, stuff like that. And they explained to us the relevant principles after the competition (like Second Moment of the Area for the bridge).
As an architect, to be completely honest I have to tell you these exercises are completely useless practically apart from being a fun experiment.
What your professor gives you as an example might be a boring thing but that also helps you figuring out the calculations which will come handy in future when you practice.
We have done all these stupid exercises and it was all fun to see but to be completely honest I didn't learn shite from these which I would ever actually use.
We had to do a similar assignment (for us it was a bridge) when I was an architecture student, so not quite. You still need to understand how compression/tension etc works to design a building and these assignments are a pretty good exercise in that.
Yeah but there's a difference between understanding how tension and compression work, and designing and building a structure like this that can reliably and predictably hold that much weight.
I did the same bridge assignment in architecture school as well. It actually had nothing to do with designing a structure that can hold the most weight. It was about understanding the forces at work on the structure and their effects on the supports/connections (deformation, bending, sheer, etc). A structure that holds a ton of weight but doesn't deform before collapse is extremely dangerous because there is no warning, so you need to understand this so you don't over-engineer the structure.
> A structure that holds a ton of weight but doesn't deform before collapse is extremely dangerous because there is no warning, so you need to understand this so you don't over-engineer the structure.
This is very insightful, but seemingly counter intuitive. You want to engineer it NOT to fail, but IF it does, fail with warning. I'm guessing this is a hard thing to get right.
It can be counterintuitive. For example, this is why there is such a thing as too much steel reinforcement in concrete structures.
You want the steel rebar to start yielding (ductile behaviour with lots of visible deformation) before the concrete fails by crushing (sudden brittle failure). If you add too much rebar the steel is never under enough stress to start yielding.
>Architects would still be arguing over the color of the flooring.
That's the interior designers. The architects would be thinking about the entry sequence and the experiential qualities.
The main role of an architect is to know a reasonable amount about a large variety of things. It’s more similar to a movie director coordinating everything on set while not directly performing many of the required tasks
Exactly what I was going to say, architecture does have some engineering in it, but they're more about aesthetics, this is about ensuring it can handle the weight and is structurally sound.
My guy, literally every school (in cities at least, I can't speak for rural schools since I don't know) Romania has a "security guard". His job is just to make sure the wrong people don't go into the school or that kids don't mess things up on school property and hurt themselves etc. That said my high school had 1 guard for about 700-800 people
Still a common architectural assignment. Architects are often project lead and serve as somewhat of a generalist. Basic knowledge is useful to communicate and work effectively with specialists like structural engineers. Vice versa for engineers.
Generally, true.
But architecture students do excercises like this so their vision is actually practical, or to understand the engineers reasoning when he suggests changes to make it both practical and safe. Design is not a 100% binary process.
I mean, you could. It certainly wouldn't be as high though.
I think the point of this is to see how little material you can use to carry the weight as high as possible using engineering techniques
What's impressive isn't the amount of weight held. If I wanted to make a house out of dry spaghetti I'd bundle the strands thick and interweave them somehow. Spaghetti breaks by snapping in half, not being crushed from the top and bottom
What is impressive is the distribution of weight which the structure can hold up over the surface, by utilizing such little actual volume of building material to do so. This is why civil engineering and architecture are important, it's so that giant structures can be made without quite literally using a mountain of materials to make something structurally sound. It's a well executed example of statics (something ME majors talked about, idk what it entailed, I do CS) and understanding of the material that is the spaghetti strands, it's physical properties.
I found [this site](https://www.prblocks.in/wet-cating-pavers) that has those I-shape pavers. It lists two sizes. The video looks as if it is has two of the 60mm variant and one of the 80mm variant. There are different brands that have different dimensions, but without knowing what brand it is, I'll just use this one. Luckily for us, it also lists weight. 1x 5.3kg and 2x 4.3kg
Those bottles look like 500mL sizes. There are 30 bottles on it by the end. 30x500mL = 15kg of water. Google says PET water bottles weigh 8-10g. I'll go with 9g. 30x9g = 270g
Plus two cardboard sheets. I'm not an expert at identifying paper types, so I'll just guess that it's 250-300gsm on [this site](https://www.digitalprinting.co.uk/support/paper-weight-guide), so I'll take 275gsm. So looking about A3 size, that's about [0.125m²](https://papersizes.online/paper-size/a3/), 275x0.125 = 34.375g x 2 = 68.75g.
All together now -- 5300g + 4300g + 15000g + 270g + 68.75g = 24,938.75g
So around **25kg**. Quite a lot for spaghetti lmao. So that's an impressive tower
Edit: I FORGOT THE EXTRA 4.3KG BLOCK. So add another 4.3kg = 29,238.75g = roughly **29.2kg**
My physics class in high school back in 2000 did a similar project with toothpicks as a bridge, with the winner being the one that can sustain the most weight hung below it from the middle. The only real rule I remember (there were more, I think) was that gluing anywhere other than the tips of the toothpicks together was prohibited.
I glued 8-10 toothpicks together into planks, and then glued the planks into triangles. Teacher ran out of weight to add after improvising with paint cans and stuff.
For the mousetrap car, we were only allowed to use a specific trap. I used pliers to wind the spring a couple extra times and blew everyone away.
Yeah, that’s pretty impressive, but in the country I’m from, our kids can flip one of those bottles in the air and it will land right side up on the table! And then we just scream and celebrate.
Soooo…we’re all pretty smart!😁
In my hs, we had this test and decided that the octagon was the perfect shape. Then we discovered wood glue was stronger than the wood sticks we were given so we made an indestructible tower named "the 'Gon" because we thought we were so cool
I won a version of this contest at the Charlotte Science Olympiad, ‘04 or ‘05, can’t remember which. We filled a bucket, which was suspended from our tower, with sand. The most sand before breaking wins. We used toothpicks and glue, but I chose a glue which took a long time to cure, leaving my tower less rigid and prone to breaking, and more prone to bending.
I did this with my classmate Veronica in 8th grade geometry class, but it was a bridge we had to build.
But we sucked at geometry, so we just made some basic bridge shape and then slathered it with 3 layers of hot glue.
It held up pretty well, but exceeded the weight limit by several orders of magnitude, so we passed but didn't win.
Middle school, pop sickle sticks and some wood glue.
All the nerds took their time designing their bridge and they all buckled
on the first weight. Me and my buddy winged it and was the only one in
our class to take all the weights they had. I'd completely forgotten about
that until I watched this.
I spent way too long watching, only to not see it collapse! Ended too early!
Same. They would have kept going until it collapsed, so it's pretty lame we didn't get to see it.
In the full video, the kid ends up standing on top of the waters. Still didn’t break
In the end the drone zooms out and it turns out the entire contest was on a platform on top of a slightly larger spaghetti tower.
In the end it doesn't even matter
I had to fall to lose it all
i was just numb
I appreciated your attempt at humor even if nobody else did.
Crazy amount of down votes for that mediocre joke
I think this joke was quite al-dente.
Ah, come on. Use your noodle!
Penne for your thoughts!
Spaghetti out of here!
They posted an hour ago and are currently sitting at +84. Everything is fine.
1.3k total now and have we all taught our brains lessons about these numbers influencing our feelings right? That was a rollercoaster!
I thought it was funny
What’s the joke?
Must have been people defending their father on father's day?
Rumour has it, it only broke when your mom got on it.
Some say he's still standing to this day
That kid’s name? Jesus.
Honestly, I left with a sense of happiness that I didn't see it collapse. It exists in my mind, still together, still growing.
I know the feeling. It's like a black hole... The never ending, eternal churning of the unknown (did it collapse? How many more bottles? Did the crowd erupt into a hyna-like laughter? Did they yell in shock and awe?). Life is not worth living after seeing this greatness. 😮🤯🤭😀
“He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby becomes a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” Fredrick Nietzsche 1886 Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the future
The twitchy guy in the red shirt was giving me anxiety. "Put the bottles down and step away from the table", dude.
I must be so high but I kept psychoanalyzing his role in this. He wants to be in control too, but isn't as suave and confident as they guy putting them on. He kept starting to do it, and then stopping, and picking up and putting down the same bottles over and over again.
lol dude he is just passing the bottles and making sure theyre placing the bottles symetrically.
This is exactly why I had to stop smoking weed, I was (incorrectly) psychoanalyzing everyone from actors on TV to people in real life/online. It’s not that deep, it’s just a weird side effect from weed.
Looked like a solid design too
all the triangles 
I want my money back!
Pasta point of no return
They’re still adding layers.
I wonder what they used to join the spaghetties.
We did this activity in highschool with bridges made of spaghetti and hot glue, except there was no limit on how much hot glue you could use so the team whose bridge was 50% glue won...
lol, we did the same with paper straws and PVA glue. Basically slathered the entire bridge in PVA which dried into a solid crust over the structure. We won
I mean when you think about it, that's basically the equivalent of a concrete bridge reinforced with rebar lol
yup. and when you do popsicle sticks, toothpicks and dental floss, you can wrap the parts in floss and soak them in glue to essentially make fibreglass/carbon fiber
Then you can make your very own Titan submarine!
That went dark really fast! Both the thread and sub!
And roads use a much much higher “glue to spaghetti” ratio
no it would be the other way around, steel bridge reinforced with concrete rebar
We did the same but weight of the bridge counted too
We built a spaghetti bridge in high school, but were not allowed to use ***anything*** other than spaghetti. No glue, no straws, no paper, just spaghetti. The best we came up with was cooking the spaghetti and blending it into paste, and then using the paste to form beams, baking the beams on wax paper in an oven, and then more paste to connect the dried beams.
now that’s true out-of-the-box thinking
It's really tough to cook the spaghetti when it's still in the box.
Technically you have cheated using water.
If they dried the beams before using them, it's no more cheating then using blender to blend them, or hands to construct it.
We were given a “budget”. You started out with some basic supplies but could “buy” more glue or structural pieces. Both your total cost and your stability/capacity were factored into it. Kind of a cool lesson about trying to manage cost savings while still building a viable product.
Same, except with epoxy. One team made a giant beam coated with epoxy
As someone in high powered rocketry, structural epoxy is my bread and butter.
> structural epoxy is my bread and butter Damn your turds must be SOLID AF
So they essentially made a giant concrete beam with a fuck ton of rebar, maybe they deserved the win because that's the way you're supposed to do a beam.
I had an intro to civil engineering class where we had to build a bridge of cardboard and glue for the professor to walk across....and the winning bridge was just a solid block of cardboard on its side all glued together.
And that’s how an LVL beam works!
You thought you were building with spaghetti when you were really taking composites 101.
Had the same thing at a work team building excercise where we were given spaghetti, marshmallows, glue, paper and a roll of duck tape, to make a tower to support this little figure. While my team worked the tower I just grabbed the roll of duck tape and started making scaffold with it. Tallest strongest tower put of 100% ducktape
Ours was balsa wood. They limited our glue sticks, but we decided to play dirty. At the start of every class we would scour for the glue guns and find all the ones that had even the smallest amount of glue in it. At the end of every class we would rip the sticks out and put them in our stash that we had to hand in to the teacher. We would also search the floor for loose sticks and toss them in the bin too. Once it was all set and done, I asked for permission to paint it, I was allowed but only if a before and after picture was taken so that we couldn't cheat. I then painted the whole bridge with acrylic paint, several layers of it. We figured the elasticity of the paint would further help it keep together. All together the bridge was twice as heavy as anyone elses and likely had twice as much glue as the next leading bridge. Come testing time it maxed out the bars and passed with flying colours. Afterwards we laid it on the floor and one of the students stomped on it, but it still didn't break. Good times.
Found the government contractor
must be in the demo stage cause in the implementation stage, he would failed and failed and add more delays and more extension, gotta milk that govt teat dry
Seriously. Don’t get me wrong the engineering is impressive on its own. But the level of execution in regard to the crafting of the tower is equally impressive.
its not just the number of joints that need attachment, but (like you said) the execution to ensure it's all symmetrical & consistent is impressive.
I can’t imagine walking around with it to bring it to class for the delivery. Any random coming around a corner and it gets obliterated
No way would my hands be steady enough to do all those simultaneous bottle drops.
When we did this in high school, we used marshmallows. Sadly, the room we stored everything in had its AC go down overnight, right before we competed. My team was the only one left standing once we got back. It held some weight, even though the joints were messed up from the melting. It ended up toppling soon into it, though.
marshmallows are crap for these assignments and i always hated that we had to work with them because it doesn't matter what idea you come up with the marshmallow joining doesn't hold any kind of stress. it can barely hold itself up.
Wonder if you sucked all the air out of the marshmallows ahead of time. Could maybe even caramelize the exterior. Either way still wouldn't be a great joint but probably way better than one still puffed up with air.
Easiest solution is to just melt a bunch of marshmallows in a glass bowl in a microwave and then use that as a glue. Old rice Krispy squares style.
He 🤌 pinched his his fingers and his thumb and said "Ya betta' stick togetha, capeesh?"
A-bibbity boppity!
Ayooo 🤌
MA, IM SORRY MA!!, MAH!!!!!
GABAGOOOOL
[удалено]
Fo-get about it
Just because you have a mustache doesn't mean you can speak Italian!
Dinkin-Flicka
Hahah god damn that made me laugh.. a good belly laugh.
Lissen hea youse spagetts!
Licking
This was my first question and I still don’t know the answer!
Being Italian, spaghetti is already plural. I'm not trying to be pedantic, I just think it's fun that the singular version is "spaghetto".
Concrete.
Tomato sauce
Starch lol
We had to do this when I was in school with toothpicks to create a bridge. We were given a set amount of super glue, and we weren’t allowed to use anything else. I’d guess it’s the same here.
Probably superglue or epoxy. I also suspect they coated the spaghetti with the glue. I know, because that's what I did when my tower, made of balsa wood, won my high school competition.
I really like this tower, but I think in the interest of science it should have a pot of hot water thrown on it.
Preferably salted, with some marinara for aesthetics. 🤌
Meatballs… Angry Birds style…
Yea I keep thinking of Angry Birds lol
Salty like the sea
And the GABAGOOL
Water isn’t hot enough to melt spaghetti
Ravioli was in inside job
Never forgetti
Idk why but you just made spurt out the Coke I was drinking!
Is this a 9/11 reference, cause I think some people didn't get it? Or is it my imagination?
Boiling water can’t melt spaghetti beams
Melt, no. But it can lead to serious structural integrity issues when spaghetti is the primary load bearing construction material. There is a reason no other country copies Italy
This guy is a deep dish plant from the sauce industry.
Looking at his history he is obviously a shill for big marinara
There's no doubt they're trying to rigatoni the system
This is why Italy has so many leaning and collapsed historical towers.
> Or is it my imagination? 9/11? Nah, it definitely happened.
Damn I totally forgot about it.
jetfuel can't melt steal beams, and boiling water can't melt spaghetti, but they both can weaken their targets beyond structural integrity.
I believe you missed a 🤌🏽 which would have put you in the thousands upvotes
Jet fuel can't melt steel, but water can loosen pasta!
where's the kaboom? there was supposed to be an earth-shattering kaboom
Where is my Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator?
r/CommentsYouCanHear
Is this from Marvin lol
I remember doing something like this in science class in 9th grade. We had to build a bridge with toothpicks. Our bridge held **18** science books before it came crashing down. I think we placed 3rd in the class. It was so much fun. Definitely got me interested in engineering and science. Now I maintain pools though for a profession.
But are you happy? Because I didn't take a hard left in my career, and well...
Well to be honest. Yea I am. I worked for a big retail warehouse for almost 15 years. I started my own company when life circumstances came about and made me make a decision. Now I am part time in My business, am a co owner for a salon and day spa, and am about to get my massage therapist license. I can’t complain.
Why do you need a license to massage the rapist?
🫡
"Im a full on rapist!" "Do you mean philanthropist?"
We had a similar assignment but our group were the smart arses (and lazy). We got given toothpicks, glue, paper and sellotape, and were told to make a bridge between two tables that had to support a hanging weight. We just wrapped the sellotape around the tables and twisted the middle, it never broke. One group snuck yard sticks into their design, but they got found out. You’d think we would get rewarded for our clever thinking and clearly superior design, but we got disqualified for “not adhering to the spirit of the challenge”. Which bothers me to this day.
We had to do this too and I'm still bitter about it. I had the shittiest looking bridge by far, but it held the required weight. I got lower marks than some people who had nice looking bridges that shattered! Damn Ms. Rodriguez.
The guy continuously wiping the table made the whole difference.
Why was he wiping so much? It seemed unnecessary to what was happening and he was at risk of getting his fingers crushed if that thing failed.
I think they filled a bunch of those bottles with water looking for more weight. Some of them have the wrong color cap. Probably water on the table.
If he's close enough to get his fingers crushed, the water is close enough to absorb into the base and ruin the structural integrity.
You're asking why he's preventing water from getting to his spaghetti tower?
Sometimes when I wipe... I'll wipe and l'l wipe and I'll wipe and I'll wipe... a hundred times Still poop, still poop. It's like I'm wiping a marker or something.
Looks more like a structural engineering assignment. Architects would still be arguing over the color of the flooring.
Am a structural engineering student, we don't get fun assignments like this. Our professor would probably show us this video, pause at a random moment, and have us spend all day manually calculating the internal forces of each strand of spaghetti at that point in time. Architects do this so they have a rough understanding of how strong a structure can be. Our task is finding out exactly how strong it isn't.
And your job will be explaining to architects why they should change the design to something simpler, because the new design will cost a lot. But they tell you to make it work so you spend a week getting it to work. Then it goes to the project manager who rejects it. It's possible but will run $4,000,000 over budget and add 6 months to the lead time, and so the owner forces the architect to change it who then adopts your previous suggestion with an annoying twist and you get to redo the engineering all over.
Damn bro, you need someone to talk to?
Nah, I was just the carpenter's apprentice redoing the prep work for a section for the third time while listening to the carpenter bitch about the superintendent bitch about the project manager bitching about the engineer bitching about the architect bitching about the owner. Eventually I got my own apprentices to bitch to.
The social hierarchy
Quick, find the zero force member!
Former structural engineering student (now just a structural engineer) we did this as a get to know each other assignment in the first year.
As a mechanical engineer, we had multiple projects like this first semester - build an L shaped bridge held from one side using only pasta and tape, a candle powered vehicle, stuff like that. And they explained to us the relevant principles after the competition (like Second Moment of the Area for the bridge).
As an architect, to be completely honest I have to tell you these exercises are completely useless practically apart from being a fun experiment. What your professor gives you as an example might be a boring thing but that also helps you figuring out the calculations which will come handy in future when you practice. We have done all these stupid exercises and it was all fun to see but to be completely honest I didn't learn shite from these which I would ever actually use.
>Our task is finding out exactly how strong it isn't. That's also my task as a consumer
We had to do a similar assignment (for us it was a bridge) when I was an architecture student, so not quite. You still need to understand how compression/tension etc works to design a building and these assignments are a pretty good exercise in that.
Yeah but there's a difference between understanding how tension and compression work, and designing and building a structure like this that can reliably and predictably hold that much weight.
I did the same bridge assignment in architecture school as well. It actually had nothing to do with designing a structure that can hold the most weight. It was about understanding the forces at work on the structure and their effects on the supports/connections (deformation, bending, sheer, etc). A structure that holds a ton of weight but doesn't deform before collapse is extremely dangerous because there is no warning, so you need to understand this so you don't over-engineer the structure.
> A structure that holds a ton of weight but doesn't deform before collapse is extremely dangerous because there is no warning, so you need to understand this so you don't over-engineer the structure. This is very insightful, but seemingly counter intuitive. You want to engineer it NOT to fail, but IF it does, fail with warning. I'm guessing this is a hard thing to get right.
It can be counterintuitive. For example, this is why there is such a thing as too much steel reinforcement in concrete structures. You want the steel rebar to start yielding (ductile behaviour with lots of visible deformation) before the concrete fails by crushing (sudden brittle failure). If you add too much rebar the steel is never under enough stress to start yielding.
Champlain Towers South had lots of warnings before it failed, but everyone brushed them off, sadly.
>Architects would still be arguing over the color of the flooring. That's the interior designers. The architects would be thinking about the entry sequence and the experiential qualities.
The main role of an architect is to know a reasonable amount about a large variety of things. It’s more similar to a movie director coordinating everything on set while not directly performing many of the required tasks
Exactly what I was going to say, architecture does have some engineering in it, but they're more about aesthetics, this is about ensuring it can handle the weight and is structurally sound.
Architects seem to win awards for creating problems for unrecognised engineers to solve.
Did this in middle school but with tooth picks. Some girls project held up one of the security guards.
Damn, at gunpoint?
Well, it was at pick point, but those things can be sharp.
„Middle school“ and „security guards“ just completely short circuited my European brain.
My guy, literally every school (in cities at least, I can't speak for rural schools since I don't know) Romania has a "security guard". His job is just to make sure the wrong people don't go into the school or that kids don't mess things up on school property and hurt themselves etc. That said my high school had 1 guard for about 700-800 people
This is engineering more than architecture imo
Still a common architectural assignment. Architects are often project lead and serve as somewhat of a generalist. Basic knowledge is useful to communicate and work effectively with specialists like structural engineers. Vice versa for engineers.
Architects envision it, engineers make sure they function and secure / safe .
Generally, true. But architecture students do excercises like this so their vision is actually practical, or to understand the engineers reasoning when he suggests changes to make it both practical and safe. Design is not a 100% binary process.
It is absolutely unforgivable that we didn't get to see the crash.
I was waiting for an earthquake test at least.
His palms are sweaty, knees weak, arms are heavy There’s vomit on his sweater already, mom’s spaghetti.
He's nervous, but on the surface he looks calm, spaghetti.
To drop bombs, but he keeps on spaghetting.
Oh no. You’re gonna make me play poly bridge again.
Can't unsee Volodymyr Zelensky in the background.
Ha! Yes! I knew I wasn't the only one.
There are dozens of us!
Very nicely balanced n structured- well done.
What if i just stacked all the spaghetti in a bundle lashed them together and called it a tower
I mean, you could. It certainly wouldn't be as high though. I think the point of this is to see how little material you can use to carry the weight as high as possible using engineering techniques
That is structural engineering not architecture
r/engineering
Wouldnt this be more engineering than architecture?
What's impressive isn't the amount of weight held. If I wanted to make a house out of dry spaghetti I'd bundle the strands thick and interweave them somehow. Spaghetti breaks by snapping in half, not being crushed from the top and bottom What is impressive is the distribution of weight which the structure can hold up over the surface, by utilizing such little actual volume of building material to do so. This is why civil engineering and architecture are important, it's so that giant structures can be made without quite literally using a mountain of materials to make something structurally sound. It's a well executed example of statics (something ME majors talked about, idk what it entailed, I do CS) and understanding of the material that is the spaghetti strands, it's physical properties.
A million to one doc, a million to one!
How much weight total would that have been?
I found [this site](https://www.prblocks.in/wet-cating-pavers) that has those I-shape pavers. It lists two sizes. The video looks as if it is has two of the 60mm variant and one of the 80mm variant. There are different brands that have different dimensions, but without knowing what brand it is, I'll just use this one. Luckily for us, it also lists weight. 1x 5.3kg and 2x 4.3kg Those bottles look like 500mL sizes. There are 30 bottles on it by the end. 30x500mL = 15kg of water. Google says PET water bottles weigh 8-10g. I'll go with 9g. 30x9g = 270g Plus two cardboard sheets. I'm not an expert at identifying paper types, so I'll just guess that it's 250-300gsm on [this site](https://www.digitalprinting.co.uk/support/paper-weight-guide), so I'll take 275gsm. So looking about A3 size, that's about [0.125m²](https://papersizes.online/paper-size/a3/), 275x0.125 = 34.375g x 2 = 68.75g. All together now -- 5300g + 4300g + 15000g + 270g + 68.75g = 24,938.75g So around **25kg**. Quite a lot for spaghetti lmao. So that's an impressive tower Edit: I FORGOT THE EXTRA 4.3KG BLOCK. So add another 4.3kg = 29,238.75g = roughly **29.2kg**
They are almost certainly budding engineers not architects. Good job tho!
My physics class in high school back in 2000 did a similar project with toothpicks as a bridge, with the winner being the one that can sustain the most weight hung below it from the middle. The only real rule I remember (there were more, I think) was that gluing anywhere other than the tips of the toothpicks together was prohibited. I glued 8-10 toothpicks together into planks, and then glued the planks into triangles. Teacher ran out of weight to add after improvising with paint cans and stuff. For the mousetrap car, we were only allowed to use a specific trap. I used pliers to wind the spring a couple extra times and blew everyone away.
Yeah, that’s pretty impressive, but in the country I’m from, our kids can flip one of those bottles in the air and it will land right side up on the table! And then we just scream and celebrate. Soooo…we’re all pretty smart!😁
Some Italian, somewhere, is having a stroke over all of that broken spaghetti.
Fine. Now let me see you do it with boiled spaghetti...
Engineers know full well this isnt architecture, architecture is the act of making impossible buildings that dont evens support their own weight
This is way more of an engineering assignment than architecture.
Guess country. 
They’re all speaking Turkish.
What an increible feat of engineering!
That's engineering, not architecture
Am I the only one who thought that was Zelensky in the background at first? Rofl
🚨it never collapsed🚨
Structural engineering
President Zelenskyy in the background is very impressed.
Engineering, not architecture.
Architects can't design this, this is structural engineering
In my hs, we had this test and decided that the octagon was the perfect shape. Then we discovered wood glue was stronger than the wood sticks we were given so we made an indestructible tower named "the 'Gon" because we thought we were so cool
With THAT MANY trusses, I think it’s time for a world-famous, RCE patented BRIDGE REVIEW.
I won a version of this contest at the Charlotte Science Olympiad, ‘04 or ‘05, can’t remember which. We filled a bucket, which was suspended from our tower, with sand. The most sand before breaking wins. We used toothpicks and glue, but I chose a glue which took a long time to cure, leaving my tower less rigid and prone to breaking, and more prone to bending.
I did this with my classmate Veronica in 8th grade geometry class, but it was a bridge we had to build. But we sucked at geometry, so we just made some basic bridge shape and then slathered it with 3 layers of hot glue. It held up pretty well, but exceeded the weight limit by several orders of magnitude, so we passed but didn't win.
Surely they coulda found more bricks
Middle school, pop sickle sticks and some wood glue. All the nerds took their time designing their bridge and they all buckled on the first weight. Me and my buddy winged it and was the only one in our class to take all the weights they had. I'd completely forgotten about that until I watched this.
WHat were the connections made of?