how do people who plan tall buildings know in advance that they have a good design that will survive an earthquake or high winds?
In: Engineering
In the past? They didn’t necessarily know. They would do their best and attempt to account for forces, but the earliest skyscrapers were just that, *early,* we didn’t know as much as we know now.
Before the powerful computers we have today, but after we’d learned more about this stuff, you could actually build scale models and subject them to various stresses (e.g. an earthquake simulation or a wind tunnel) to determine the kinds of design you’d need in order to make a safe building.
These days, they would use computer models and simulations of the design under various conditions to predict what might happen. We have a pretty good idea how wind and earthquakes work, and a building is actually *relatively* simple compared to some other kinds of things we could simulate. Of course, simulations aren’t perfect and sometimes we still make mistakes, e.g. London’s Millennium Bridge infamously had issues with resonance when it was first constructed.
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