: how did people in the past ensure that a building/structure will be structurally sound?
In: 5150
Trial and error. Push the envelope on what’s been put up before. See whether it works. Learn from the things that go wrong.
European cathedrals are a classic example – quite a few early ones had to have big, thick buttresses added to them as they grew, to stop the lower walls from being squished outwards by the weight of the building above them. And big buttresses themselves are heavy, which give you even more problems if you want to build multiple levels of building. Then some bright spark realised that they could make a buttress out of half an arch instead of a solid lump, and – hey presto – the flying buttress, way less weight needed to redirect the forces, and much more elegant structures to boot.
There’s also a strong suspicion that at least one pyramid ([the “Bent Pyramid”](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bent_Pyramid)), is the shape it is because it was showing signs of instabiliy because of its size and the original construction angle.
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