Basically the title. I’m in my third year of civil engineering and I’m not proud to say this but I still couldn’t explain properly to someone younger if I was asked. Also what’s the difference between civil engineering and architecture? Because in all the infos I’ve found the boundary is still quite blurry.
Thank you
In: 3
There’s a saying I heard an old engineer say once which I’m going to paraphrase here:
* Mechanical engineers build weapons.
* Civil engineers build targets.
(There are many other types as well; I’m a software engineer, for example.)
So why would a civil engineer be said to be building targets?
Civil, in this context, refers to anything used by the public, specifically in the same sense as ‘civic’ (not the Honda variety). Things like roadways or stormwater systems, bridges (though less about building the bridge and more about where to put the bridge), building (again, more about the placement of the building and how it connect to utilities and how it affects traffic).
If you’ve ever played SimCity or Cities: Skylines and had to solve complex problems about where to put transit, zones, etc, you have a bit of an idea about what a city planner does. But if you’ve installed the TMPE plugin and other traffic mods and got into the nitty-gritty about traffic flow and intersection design, then congrats, you know what a traffic engineer is. But (pretending that Cities: Skylines is real life), once the traffic engineer and city planner have figured out how they want the road configured, a civil engineer would be given the specifications.
The civil engineer draws up the blueprint for an intersection and designs where all the fixtures (lights, signs, markings, planters, speed humps, medians, maholes, stormwater drains, etc) are going to go. DWP wants access to a utility closet that’s underground so you have to include the placement of manholes in the street. There’s a water main 4 feet down (despite code calling for it to be 10 feet down) which coincidentally crosses the sidewalk right at the north east corner of the street so the turn signal support post will need a different kind of footing so the weight doesn’t damage the pipe. A line-of-sight requirement requires that the timer box be set back an additional 35 feet from where it was planned which is going to cause a budgetary concern. And we’re not even going to talk about the 15 foot wide granite boulder which was discovered while excavation was in progress, but now you gotta figure out how to deal with. (Blasting is not permitted and there are overhead power lines, so no crane.) And now a truck decided to ignore the cones and barricades and drove onto the freshly laid rebar which will delay the concrete pour by a week while it’s fixed. “I got 4-wheel-drive” don’t mean shit when the rebar catches your wheel and drive shaft and gets all wrapped up around them.
—
Just for completeness:
The civil engineer designs and plans outdoor spaces. I used a traffic intersection as an example above but private companies may bring in an engineer to design a shopping center or an amusement park or a waterfront or an airport. This generally includes the placement of buildings but not the design of the building (though civil engineers and architectural engineers frequently work together in situations where the design of the building affect the design of the outdoor space).
As a rule:
* Mechanical engineer: ± 0.0001 ”
* Architectural engineer: ± 1″
* Civil engineer: ± 1′
Latest Answers