The Au Túr Solais – ‘Tower of Light’ in English - is a spire that rises 120 metres above O’Connell Street, Dublin’s main thoroughfare. Designed by Ian Ritchie Architects, it was completed on the 21 January 2003. On that day, as the final sections were craned into place, a young engineering student watched transfixed. ‘I stood there for hours, watching the last bits go up,’ Mark Gordon recalls. ‘I looked at it and just thought wow.’
That moment started a curiosity and interest in the built environment which lasts to this day although Mark’s focus moved from making buildings stand up, to wondering what was happening under the ground. ‘My neighbour at home had a civil engineering consultancy, and during university I did a summer placement with him,’ Mark explains. ‘He sent me out to survey the site of a large, old hospital in the countryside. It was more like a small town than a hospital. It had its own water supply, streams and fountains, its own wastewater treatment plant – things I’d never seen before’. He became fascinated with the quiet, hidden infrastructure that was serving the buildings above.
It was the sustainable nature of the civil engineering at that old country hospital, both environmental and social, that left an indelible mark on him. ‘Two of the pillars of SuDS (Sustainable Drainage Systems) are biodiversity and amenity. Where we can, we design ponds, rain gardens and other surface features to compliment landscaped spaces. This means that we are making space for water in a sustainable manner but also creating natural elements that people can enjoy. There is a social amenity to the infrastructure. Provide the storage but do it in a way that looks better and doesn’t need big plastic tanks buried in the ground.’
The theme of sustainability is clearly something very important to Mark. He talks with authority about the need to design for sustainability, but he also talks about the additional responsibilities involving prevention and maintenance that can make a massive difference. ‘You can design the most beautiful building in the world, but if you don’t maintain it then you are going to have an issue. It’s the same with infrastructure. In some ways it’s even more challenging because much of it is invisible. If you see a crack in a wall, you might make more of an effort than you would with a blocked drain below the ground. You can design what you like but if it’s blocked then there is no space for water.’
Mark has also written extensively about preventative maintenance, publishing articles that focussed on the cost of getting it wrong. He speaks about the carbon wasted in the clean-up after flooding. ‘We always try to use less material in construction, lowering embodied carbon where we can. But what is rarely considered is the environmental cost of cleaning up the tonnes of waste after a flood event. All that sodden carpet. The plasterboard. The wood and the wiring. The CO2 spend is enormous.’
Another aspect of the job that gets Mark excited is his ability to get projects started in the first place. He sees civil engineering as the key that can ‘unlock’ a site from its constraints, and hence a bigger project. ‘Armed with solutions to potential stumbling blocks, and risk mitigation, I outline how and why our proposals should never be a barrier to getting planning approval for the project. I find it very gratifying when we find solutions for tricky sites’.
Mark is the second Partner to be elevated from the civil engineering team at Price & Myers, joining Dimitris Linardatos. The team now numbers nearly 20, having grown from when Mark was just the third civil engineer at P&M. He is looking forward to acting as a mentor to others, as Dimitris was with him. Lighting a fire for engineering in others like the one that was lit in him as a student is a responsibility that Mark relishes.
