Built summary

A great many engineers were first bitten by the building bug as children, and plenty of them experienced the wonders of construction while playing with their first LEGO set. And, really, modern buildings aren’t so different from LEGO constructions: each is composed of a variety of smaller components.

Take pretty much any structure, and you’ll find that its frame is made of a network of beams, braces, columns and trusses.

Gravity is not a force to be taken lightly, but at least it’s predictable – which is more than one can say about some of the other natural forces that engineers have to deal with.

Wind poses an especially tricky problem.

In 1968, in Canning Town, London, Ivy Hodge killed four people by attempting to make a cup of tea.

Hodge lived in a high-rise building made of prefabricated concrete blocks, which were held together by nothing more than friction and a small amount of concrete. Unfortunately, on that day in 1968, a defective boiler had been leaking gas into Hodge’s apartment, so when she went to light the stove, there was a small explosion.

You’ve doubtless seen a brick building. You might even live in one. But did you know that bricks have been around for more than 11,000 years?

Back in 9000 BCE, the neolithic inhabitants of Jericho put bricks to extensive use. After molding pieces of clay into rough bricks, they’d let them dry in the sun, after which they’d use them to construct their beehive-shaped domiciles.

At first glance, concrete might not seem like a particularly exciting substance. But, without it, some of the world’s most awe-inspiring structures – from Rome’s massive, 2,000-year-old Pantheon to the towering skyscrapers of today – never would have been built.

Concrete is a complex whole created from simple parts.

Skyscrapers are inherently symbolic. They’re emblematic of some of humanity’s greatest qualities – our ambition, for instance, and our inexhaustible capacity for innovation. But it’s only in recent times that we’ve actually started constructing buildings as high as our expectations.

For almost 4,000 years, the world’s tallest structure was the Great Pyramid of Giza, completed in 2560 BCE, which, at 146 meters tall, was pretty short by today’s standards. Then, starting in the fourteenth century, a series of cathedrals traded the distinction of tallest building, with one cathedral losing it to another whenever its spire snapped off in rough weather.

Prior to drawing up any blueprints or making any plans, an engineer has to know almost everything about the ground he’ll be building on.

If he doesn’t, there can be serious long-term consequences.

Civilizations, like trees, tend to pop up wherever there’s water. But even if there’s no water in sight, structural engineers have ways of finding it.

Indeed, creative engineers have been sniffing out water sources for thousands of years.

How a culture handles human waste is a pretty good indicator of how advanced that culture is.

Japan is a case in point.

It’s hard to be a woman in a male-dominated industry. Being a woman and trying to conduct a serious discussion with construction workers who are in the habit of pinning pictures of nude women to the wall is, to say the least, tricky. So it’s important for aspiring female engineers to draw inspiration from the past.

Just take Emily Warren Roebling, who, though never trained formally, completed the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge, in New York.

You now know a great deal about engineering’s history. But what about its future? Well, as new technologies continue to emerge, it seems to be getting brighter and brighter.

Here’s a sampling of some cheaper, modern construction techniques that might start replacing pricy, outdated ones: