Standing in west Tokyo, watching Tadao Kashio’s 14-A relay calculator still noisily clicking through arithmetic nearly 70 years later, I found myself thinking less about calculators and more about the future of engineering skill.

A 20-storey residential tower stands beside a three-storey udon shop, with no buffer and no transition, just a few metres between them.

After years working on large developments where everything is coordinated, this sits outside the way we usually build.

LinkedIn is not broken. It has stopped being a network-first platform.

In my feed, the shift is clear: a large share of ads and content from people I don’t know, with limited visibility of my actual network.

More noise and less relevance. Where context and trust matter, that is a problem.

A visit to Jindai-ji Temple, Tokyo — March 2026. Not a single nail, and it has been standing for 1,300 years.

We have gained powerful tools in structural design. The question is whether we are keeping the underlying craft needed to know when they are wrong.