There is a walkway between the contemporary art gallery and the rooftop garden terrace at the SF Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), and it overlooks some of the adjacent rooftops across the street. The view is pretty boring, unless you are a mechanical engineer, then all of the rooftop equipment you can see from this walkway is fairly interesting.
Every time I cross this walkway, I stop and look at all the equipment across the street.
Last time I was at the MoMA, I noticed a couple stopped in the walkway, taking a photo of the rooftop across the street. I was a little surprised, because I thought I was the only person who looked at the rooftop air conditioning equipment installed on the adjacent roof. “Must be another engineer”, I thought to myself.
It turns out that I still am the only person that checks out A/C equipment. They were only interested in Waldo:
Where's Waldo? Hiding behind the boiler water piping from the water side heating system!
That equipment that Waldo is hiding behind is probably a boiler, supplying hot water to a hydraunic heating system or something like that. The hot water from the boiler gets pumped through pipes to coils that sit in the airstream, heating up the supply air, keeping the people inside warm.
I know this because this is the kind of stuff I design at DayJob. I design a lot of Air Conditioning, Ventilation, and Heating systems. In fact, I took this photo last time I was at MoMA, because I thought all of that rooftop A/C equipment looked pretty interesting.
I was all over that rooftop before Waldo ever showed up
This is the blessing and the curse of being an Engineer. I can’t help but notice examples of the type of equipment that I design. Plumbing vents? Cool. Fire Protection system risers? Fascinating. Rooftop equipment? Stops me in my tracks.
Anyway, I took a picture of that rooftop long before Waldo showed up, making anyone else care about this roof.
That, my friends, is street cred.
At least for technical nerds.