Building Big [antikvár]

PrefaceBuilding Big began as five films about the creation of bridges, tunnels, skyscrapers, domes, and dams. Over a period of about two years, various producers, film crews, and I checked in and out of hotels on four continents and talked to a lot of people who design, build, or study these structures. While the filmmakers were concentrating at least as much on the human storiesthe ambition, the heartbreak, the triumph as on the technical, I found myself increasingly intrigued by the nuts and bolts. It's just the kind of person I am. Why this shape and not that? Why steel instead of concrete or stone? Why put it here and not over there? Asking these kinds of questions took me back to the basic design process, which itself begins with questions as engineers and designers struggle to identify and prioritize the problems that must be solved. And it was this particular aspect of building big that finally convinced me there was a role for a so-called companion book.Knowing that the films would present the big pictureincluding the larger historical, social, and environmental issues associated with the building of big thingsI was free to operate on a much smaller scale. Using some but not all of the examples chosen for the films, this book focuses entirely on the connections between the main planning and design problems that had to be solved and the solutions that were eventually built. There is something reassuring about the fact that whether structures inspire or simply intimidate with their scale, each is generally the result of a logical and therefore accessible sequence of events. Once we recognize that the elements of common sense and logic play at least as important a role in this process as imagination and technical know-how, even the biggest things we build can be brought down to size.