Records: Crown civil engineering

## **The Office of Works**

The Office of Works was established within the Royal Household to oversee construction of royal castles and residences. William of Wykeham was invited to serve as an advisor to the Office of Works. Likewise, Henry Yevele was also hired as an advisor.

Using the SNS recruiting and training tool, Richard recreated the office with the following positions.

## **Secretary of the Office of Works**

* Once the architect was fully indoctrinated in Richard’s vision, the Secretary would be the chief liaison between the Crown and the Office of Works, as well as the parliamentary and public representative. There was a level of leadership, management, public relations, marketing, philosophy and aesthetics involved in the position.

## **Chief Architect**

* The architect was recruited, reconditioned, trained and enhanced by Richard – and was among the founding members of the Royal Academy as the first Civil Engineer and Architecture representative.
* The designs of the architect were essentially to realize and guide the creation of Richard’s vision. The Chief architect would eventually split off his own subordinates into civil engineers that focused on the structural factors and architects that focused on the aesthetics.
* The Chief Architect had advanced knowledge of what materials would be at his disposal in the near future, but managed to work within bounds of discretion in early planning to prevent reveal of foreknowledge.
* Further, the Chief Architect was schooled on the aesthetics and symbology of what would eventually come to be known as the “Styles of Richard,” an application of 2 distinct Alt-U styles of construction and aesthetic that were modified to be distinct, yet with a common flow between them.

* Neoclassical
	+ A clean, powerful look that echoed the Roman empire, but brought it to a more streamlined future-present. There were three sub-categories of motif and theme, each definitely neoclassical, but each category recognizable and distinct.
	+ *Royal Neoclassical*
		- There were subdivisions between English-specific Royal, UK Royal, Plantagenet House Royal, etc.
	+ *Noble Neoclassical*
		- There were further subdivisions that allowed differentiation between houses.
		- This included color-scheme flexibility that could reflect Scottish tartan colors.
	+ *Standard Neoclassical*
		- There were further subdivisions that indicated state (England, Ireland, etc.), municipal, county, gentry or even individual differentiation.
* Modified Rococo
	+ Rococo was an intricate alternate to the neoclassical, and was to be indicative of financial and monetary affairs. Stylistically, it was sophisticated without the gaudy floridness of the baroque it skipped.
	+ There were three sub-categories of motif and theme, each definitely rococo, but each category recognizable and distinct.
	+ *Royal Rococo*
		- There were subdivisions between English-specific Royal, UK Royal, Plantagenet House Royal, etc.
	+ *Noble Rococo*
		- There were further subdivisions that allowed differentiation between houses.
	+ *Standard Rococo*
		- There were further subdivisions that indicated state (England, Ireland, etc.), municipal, county, gentry or even individual differentiation.

### **The rise of Human factors and ergonomics**

* The foundations of the science of ergonomics appear to have been laid within the context of the culture of Ancient Greece. A good deal of evidence indicates that Greek civilization in the 5th century BC used ergonomic principles in the design of their tools, jobs, and workplaces. One outstanding example of this can be found in the description Hippocrates gave of how a surgeon's workplace should be designed and how the tools he uses should be arranged. The archaeological record also shows that the early Egyptian dynasties made tools and household equipment that illustrated ergonomic principles.
* Richard was very inspired by this drive for efficiency with the human-use interface in all things. In the architectural sense, this was emphasized with ergonomics proper, anthropometry, industrial design, environmental design (including ecological and sustainability issues).

## **Chief Surveyor**

Surveying was as old claiming dirt as one’s own, but there little art and less science to it in the end of the 14th century. It would use elements of mathematics (geometry and trigonometry), physics, engineering and the law. The Chief Surveyor, like the chief architect, would go on to be a founding member of the Royal Academy.

His job was to establish land maps and boundaries for ownership, locations like building corners or the surface location of subsurface features, or other purposes required by government or civil law, such as property sales.

In cartography, they were attacking the navigation challenges from the other direction. Two important concepts that they'd addressed were the creation of coordinates on a grid, the grid using lines of latitude (north-south position), versus longitude (east-west position).

Stepping back, geodesy was the bigger aim: the measurement and representation of the Earth. The cartography was the expression of that representation. From that point of view, there was a wealth of materials to build on. Homer had advocated a flat disc while Pythagoras figured on the divinely perfect shape: a sphere (an idea later supported by Aristotle). Not all of antiquity was as close, but the methods of Eratosthenes seem to be reasonably sound. At that point Claudius Ptolemy was still a leading influence.

The influences of antiquity weren't the only scholars to have blazed trails there, though. The arabian world had gone through their own flowering, and grudgingly for many in the west, had produced great works of natural philosophy. Among the best were the works of Abu Rayhan Biruni. Al-Biruni himself was a diplomat between Muslims and the Hindus of India, bordering to their east, and that kind of understanding of religion concurrent with it's tolerance, made him a rare specimen of thought among men of any stripe.

RANP people would soon be working on locating Al-Biruni's entire library and have it translated, but the effort would be well worth it. The man could be considered the father of geodesy, and combined with Pythagoras before him, provided enough testable theory that the Royal Academy had created the modern working concept of longitude and latitude.

## **Comptroller of the Office of Works**

The Comptroller was de facto foreman for the overall rebuilding effort. The comptroller had the dueling factors of keeping a project on budget but also completing it to specification and to Richard’s near-impossible time table.

For that, the comptroller was educated not just in accounting, but in *all manner* of construction methods and techniques. As much as the rest of the crew, he also had to balance the current knowledge of England with what he could apply, while borrowing world precedent to advance the state of the art where possible and eventually to create a logical line of progression to developments that hadn’t been invented yet in the Rev-U.

### **Construction Techniques**

* The Royal Academy was leading the engineering and construction – and it was built unlike any structure on earth. It wasn’t just the building materials, though those were extremely significant – it was the planning and the process. They were ramping up production of steel and concrete, stockpiling it, hiring half of southern England (it seemed) to ship out as temporary workers, building forms and screw-driven concrete pumps for some *big* structures.
* The walls – and the interior structures – would be built of fire resistant (essentially fire-proof) steel reinforced concrete.
* They were using every trick they’d thought of so far, from steel rebar reinforcement around a riveted tongue & groove steel frame to steel wool mixed in the concrete to reduce cracking, along with other additives to reduce or eliminate susceptibility to cold, wet weather and so on.
* The concrete thickness and reinforcement was designed to withstand force a thousand times more powerful than anything that could be brought to bear.
* The concrete was usually socketed to allow panels of other stone, and sometimes wood, to be used as an aesthetic facade. Some had non-critical surface layers that were directly inset or embedded with stones or tiles, sometimes in spectacular fashion.

### **The rise of occupational safety and health**

* The Comptroller would be training people in construction techniques never before used – and didn’t want to be losing them to error and accident. For that, and coupled with the architect’s focus on ergonomics, the comptroller was blazing trails in occupational safety and health.
* This started with ergonomic design of the tools, but extended into environmental safety, such as fall protection, mandating the use of gloves and helmets, proper lifting, support clothing (weight belts and similar), structural protection and reinforcement (timbering and bracing) to prevent collapse and crushing injuries, proper ventilation to prevent black lung (miner’s disease) and asphixiation, hearing loss, heat stroke, etc.
* The implementations were instituted as early OHS law into Richard’s *Magna Carta*…