As Emily Whiting says in her videos, “skinny” beats “burly” just about every time when it comes to climbing.

We’re not entirely sure what this thing is that she’s climbing, but we know she usually gets to the top.

Ground level is of absolutely no interest to our friend, Emily.

Today’s guest blogger is Emily Whiting’s kindergarten teacher and friend, Evelyn Hambly. By Mrs. Hambly’s reckoning, she “taught about twelve hundred primary & kindergarten students over twenty-seven and a half years in Dundas, Ontario, a beautiful town in the valley of the Niagara Escarpment.” And one of those students was Emily. We thank Mrs. Hambly for taking the time to share more of Emily’s story.

I am pleased to write this blog post for Emily Whiting. I was her first teacher in kindergarten and have become her longtime friend. The architectural engineer as a young play narrator

I was in my 24th year of teaching when Emily first appeared in my classroom, hiding behind the door. I vividly remember how she peeked with sparkling, wide-open eyes, wrapped tightly in her pink raincoat. Emily was silent throughout the meet-the-teacher time. However, parents were invited to bring along anything their children had done and I was impressed by the drawings and origami Emily had made at home. Instantly I knew that here was an outstanding little girl, perfectly proper and quiet.

Within a short time Emily became the narrator for our class play “The Little Red Hen.” By Spring, Emily had mastered the highly visible post of conductor for our kindergarten instrumental orchestra. How does a quiet little girl possibly walk onto a stage and perform? I was to realize later that, whenever Emily decided to embark on a project, she would not stop until every detail had been perfected.

Watching Emily’s videos, I can’t help concluding that the study of architecture and the forces that hold buildings up (and knock them down) could only be better understood by climbing them.

Watch out for the Hunchback, Emily! It’s like any other field of science—getting up close and personal with the plant cell, the chemical element or the roman viaduct can only increase our understanding of how the structure is built and how it functions.

Of course, Emily uses software and computer models to get close to the structures she studies, but I am reminded of a BBC-produced documentary series of recent years.

Climbing Great Buildings features Dr. Jonathan Foyle climbing some of the masterpieces of British Architecture. It’s an enjoyable watch if you’re interested in architecture but also just to marvel at the sheer bravery of those involved. I can say with certainty that you’d never get me up there!

Emily’s videos and Climbing Great Buildings remind us to take a different view of our work. It’s amazing what we could find out. That being said, this particular scientist is keeping his feet firmly on the ground!

After listening to architect and rock climber Emily Whiting talk about gothic architecture, which I love, I took a look at her website and list of publications. They include the intriguing “Digital Reconstruction” and “4D Presentation through Time,” the animated movie “Portals,” which allows the visitor to wander among monuments and statues and fly inside Renaissance paintings. In “Detailed 3D Modeling of Castles,” she and collaborators digitally documented heritage sites. Rabelais was grosser, but Emily is a far better builder.

I think Emily has a special fondness for ecclesiastical architecture, just as I do, so I wondered what she might think about the fictional “Abbey of Theleme.” The tale is part of the series of stories collectively called “Gargantua,” by Francois Rabelais, the 16th-century satirical writer of the wild, grotesque, and bawdy. And though my ruminations started with the gaudy architecture of Theleme, I was lured off topic when I read about the gate leading into it. Upon the gate was inscribed a list of the kinds of people allowed inside and, most interestingly, the kinds of people barred from entry (vile bigots, hypocrites, externally devoted apes, base snites, puffed-up, wry-necked beasts, Ostrogoths, forerunners of baboons, dissembled varlets, seeming-sancts, slipshod caffards, and fat chuffcats)!

The Reverend Mother belts it out for a rapt and in love Maria.

And for our friend, Emily, too!

If you’ve wondered how it feels to take it “one move further” and how close to nature (and ourselves) we can ultimately get, we submit Ms. Emily Whiting.

Emily looks so absolutely content here… ready to start climbing, folks?

Emily Whiting loves her some stone arches. How about you?

You say you don’t have any huge slabs of stone lying around in your backyard? We buttressed this bad boy! You don’t have the workers you’d need to build a stone arch? Your back hasn’t recovered from all the shoveling you did this winter?

Ha! No more excuses.

Try out this cool NOVA interactive, “Physics of Stone Arches,” and find out just how arch-ilicious you really are.

Emily Whiting mentioned incremental success being as important as actually reaching the goal in her sport of rock climbing. For many of us, reaching the goal of whatever it is we desire is the equivalent of success. Here’s Emily, as always, taking it one step further. Often it becomes the driving power—not to improve but to reach the goal. Her comment about being able to attain just a bit more than the last time made a lot of sense. It fits life, too.

Starting out on a writing career, my dreams of a best seller, huge royalties and fan recognition featured prominently. As for science careers, finding a cure for cancer or winning the Nobel Prize for many trumps a teaching career, particularly at the elementary level. But Emily’s statement about incremental success shows life as it really is. A few people hit the big time right away. But for most of us, it’s the steps along the way that make our own career and life rewarding. With each step, small successes push us further along. The goal is the direction; the steps are our life.

Writing for magazines and small presses may not be most writers’ goals. Teaching science often conjures images of academia and scholars, not second graders testing magnets. But who is to say one has more value than the other? Choosing what you love to do is the best goal.

And the steps toward the goal are what we should celebrate, for those are the things that fulfill our dreams. And the small successes may add up to far more than the original goal in the end. Funny how rock climbing is a lot like life—and Emily is on to it. Success is simply going one step further.

Emily Whiting describes rock climbing as a time she can remove herself from society and just be in nature. As for her skill, she says, “If you can get one move further than you did the last time, that’s its own triumph.”

Lisa’s inspirational poster - full-size version after the cut What a powerful message. As a teacher, I often encounter children who strive to make progress in a difficult area. Perhaps one child struggles with reading. We work to help her get up to grade level, but she is not achieving this goal. It is time to remember that, although she might not have reached the top goal, we can celebrate small triumphs—better fluency, moving up a level or two, finding books more enjoyable. Each of these is a triumph unto itself and deserves celebrating. Maybe organization is a hard skill for a child. He forgets his homework each day, his desk is a mess, and he loses his material around the room. Perhaps he will always struggle with organization, but maybe he can learn to place his completed homework in his folder after completing finishing it so it makes it comes back to school. Maybe he can find a buddy to help him clean his desk once a week. Small triumphs can be celebrated, too.

Emily Whiting uses the latest cutting-edge technology to replicate the engineering techniques of very old buildings (like Gothic cathedrals) so that modern-day architects can build better, more efficient buildings. If you know how it would fall, you can make it stand.

I get time-travel whiplash just thinking about it.

Emily, though, gets no whiplash at all. To her, it makes perfect sense to study buildings, like the cathedrals, that have stood the test of time and are as magnificent—and structurally sound—as ever:

“I think that I have an appreciation for these methods in both engineering and art that have been around for ages—for hundreds and hundreds of years. And so maybe going back to these more primitive methods, it’s going back to where these initial pursuits first came from.”

Emily uses the principles behind these “primitive methods” in the virtual building models she creates for architects on her computer. An arch here…some stone there…and you’re working with fewer materials and you have a building that won’t collapse—or even buckle—anytime in the next century (or eight). Taking the best of the past—and using it to help create the buildings of the future—that’s the goal of Emily’s work.

And making these connections—bringing together things that others might never connect—is what drives Emily all the time:

“I think at the core, what I love about what I do is that it brings together so many different aspects of myself. You know, the art, the science. And I think essentially it’s this pairing of the form and the function. There’s this sort of elegant relationship between structural principles, and if you follow those structural principles in creating forms in a building, you’re going to get something that also looks beautiful. There’s an elegance in the mathematics [of the engineering] and it comes out as an elegance in the appearance of the design as well.”

Art. Science. Form. Function. Past. Present.

If Emily builds it, we will come.

We’re pretty sure Emily Whiting could make your house fall down (at least, in the virtual world).

So get smart and use the comments to ask her a question.

UPDATE: We are no longer taking more questions for Emily. But check out her answers in the comments. She may have answered a question you were going to ask!