: how did people in the past ensure that a building/structure will be structurally sound?
In: 5150
It’s been touched on a bit already, but the real art to engineering isn’t making something that’s structurally sound, it’s making something that’s barely structurally sound.
If you place enough concrete or stones you’ll probably eventually get something that will stand, but modern engineering is more calculated and often only uses the amount of material needed for the purposes of the structure in order to save costs. Typically there is also a factor of safety that engineers use so even structures today you could say are technically “over engineered”, but the factor of safety helps give that buffer for extraneous circumstances.
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