Profile
Steel’s loss will be the Structural’s gain
Helping the SCI thrive has been the highlight of Dr Graham Owens’ career.
Since its inception in the mid 1980’s the Steel Construction Institute has been at the fore of the success of the constructional steelwork sector. SCI Director Dr Graham Owens has had his hand on the tiller for most of that time and tells Nick Barrett that he is looking forward to a busy retirement.
The Steel Construction Institute’s output of design guides and technical papers eclipses that of any other comparable organisation in the world.’ That is the proud boast of an admittedly slightly biased Dr Graham Owens, the SCI’s retiring Director, but the record can be easily verified by doubters and the research based group he has worked for since 1986, as Director for the past 15 years, certainly enjoys an unrivalled international reputation.
Looking back over his career with the SCI Graham sees plenty of highlights, just a few temporary setbacks and a long record of success. The main highlight? ‘Helping this organisation thrive for 21 years, that has been the highlight of my career,’ he says.
London born and of Welsh descent, Graham Owens could have been lost to engineering very early on. He remembers his impressions of his undergraduate civil engineering course at Bristol University: ‘I had always wanted to be an engineer, although I was being pressed at school to study pure science, but the undergraduate course at Bristol bored me.’ He stuck it out to graduate however and moved on to Imperial College to take an MSc in Structural Engineering and then a PhD in Civil Engineering.
Something obviously caught his fancy about structural engineering because he is now the author of 56 papers and two books and is the co- editor of the Steel Designers’ Manual. He has also been a leading innovator in technical education, developing the MSc in Structural Steel Design at Imperial College, managing the UK Education in Steel Design Project and directing ESDEP, the European Steel Design Education Programme.
A post graduate year spent as a volunteer with the United Nations in Tanzania reveals an idealistic streak coupled with a social conscience. ‘It was
a lonely but enjoyable posting with two of us travelling around doing feasibility work on roads and bridges projects.’
Back in the UK came two years with John Laing whom he left because they were not keen on giving design office experience. Joining consulting engineer Flint & Neil was a key move. ‘Tony Flint, Brian Smith and Arthur Lowe put a great emphasis on real engineering, on a practical approach, which appealed to me. I gained a great and lasting enthusiasm for structures while there.’
Two years at Flint & Neil ended when he answered the call of academe to return to Imperial College as a research assistant before becoming a lecturer in 1973. Imperial must have been conducive to the young Owens’ enthusiasm for structures because he stayed there for 17 years. ‘It was great preparation for the SCI job, but nothing was planned, it was serendipity.’
Some of the publications and websites that Dr Graham Owens takes justifiable pride in.
By the time he left Imperial in 1986 he had been fully immersed in all aspects of steel design. The major success of those years was establishing the MSc in structural steelwork design. Universities were not teaching steelwork design adequately, partly because during the Second World War there was little available for constructional use, and in the post war period strategic industries like coal mining swallowed up a lot of steel production and growing industries like car manufacturing also had a voracious appetite for what steel could be produced.
British Steel chief Ian McGregor realised that construction could be a valuable market for his product, with coal mining and car manufacturing both in decline at the dawn of the 1980’s. This led to a mammoth exercise in collaboration between the nationalised British Steel and 46 universities that resulted in production of everything needed to teach a course in structural steel design. This led on to the well known backing of British Steel for the foundation of the SCI.
Designers recognise that they have an invaluable technical resource in the SCI, one that aims to make their lives as easy as possible when they design in steel. The fact that it is so straightforward is in large part down to the efforts of the SCI over the years since its inception, when it was formed by a handful of dedicated steel supporters, academics and practicing designers. Also important, says Graham, was the backing of hard headed commercial men in British Steel and support from a work hungry fabricating sector.
‘The task when we started was to get steel on the map,’ he recalls. ‘When we started there was virtually no guidance for practical engineers. This was in sharp contrast to the concrete sector which had a specialist organisation with about 500 staff busy carrying out research and promotional work. There was nothing at all for bridge designers in steel whereas now there are six steel bridge design guides.’
With no industry standard for connections each fabricator used to design their own in their own way. This could mean saving the use of a bolt here and there, but it all then had to be verified by an engineer.
There was a meeting held where 140 designers came together in a single room and thrashed
out methods to be adopted in the interests of standardisation. Graham recalls: ‘We simply put things to a vote and chose what the majority preferred. This meant software could be produced in line with what would become the Green Book, and the flow of information was improved immensely.’
The relationship with the UK’s major steel producer, originally British Steel and now Corus, has been extremely close. British Steel provided the initial investment to get the SCI up and running. ‘Bob Latter from British Steel used to describe his job marketing steel to the construction industry
as firing cannonballs – our role at the SCI was to produce the cannonballs in the shape of design guidance and other technical support, and we needed at least a couple of new ones each year.’
Looking ahead, he predicts that the construction industry has only seen the start of the impact of sustainability but is confident that steel will remain the sustainable material of choice. ‘There is a vitality to steel construction in the UK that I don’t see anywhere else in the world, ‘ he says, ‘whether it is for heavy sections for long span construction
or light gauge steel for uses such as housebuilding. Our aim in the early days was to make it easy to specify steel and our success was due to providing the technical background to allow that. It was also due to hard driving ambitious entrepreneurial people in the fabricating industry which we don’t see in other countries. British Steel’s marketing drives, its vision in establishing the SCI and its continuing sponsorship as Corus have been essential underpinning to our role.’
From the top job at the SCI Graham will move to a consultancy role before taking over the Presidency of the Institution of Structural Engineers in 2009. There should also be a bit of spare time to devote to sailing, furniture restoration and gardening.
He concludes: ‘The story of the development of steel as a constructional material is far from over, and I am confident that I leave the SCI in a position to play as key a role over the next twenty years as it did in the past.’
