MRes students André Neto-Bradley and Mar Gimenéz take Civil Engineering Construction to a festive level with their self-made Gingerbread House. Their carefully constructed Gingerbread House is a replica of the new Dyson Building on the Engineering Department site in Cambridge. The Dyson Building is also the new home of FIBE-CDT since it’s completion in summer this year.
According to André, who has delighted fellow FIBE staff and students with his confectionary creations in the past, the gingerbread house took almost a day with fellow student, Mar, to complete. They've even put in the words "Apply to FIBE" in icing on the roof-top which earned extra brownie points for the FIBE recruitment campaign. The glass windows is a delicious concoction of melted yellow, orange and red gummy-bears. Marshmallow window frames, cut out gingerbread columns and a variety of tempting sweets stuck all over the house complete their culinary engineering tribute to the Christmas season.
André and Mar and Rebecca Hartwell have also started the Tensegrity Club, brainchild of Engineering Lecturer, Allan McRobie’s Matlab design classes. Tensegrity structures represent equilibrium and are half in tension and half in compression. They look almost impossible because none of the structural sticks touch each other. They are held in place with tension wires and are only stable when the last tension wire is attached.
The structure took hours to build with both graduate and undergraduate students in the Tensegrity Club, among whom were FIBE students André, Mar and Rebecca. Mar likened it to doing acrobatic yoga as the pieces have to be held together till the final tension wire is in place. The resulting tensegrity structure now decorated with christmas lights hangs like a giant filigree Christmas bauble of a tree on the Engineering site. André is already planning to go bigger with their tensegrity structures next term. Who says Civil Engineering can't be fun.