Resilience-Based Seismic Design: Designing for Reoccupancy, Not Just Survival
A Different Question Than Conventional Code-Minimum Seismic Design Asks Conventional seismic code design, discussed throughout this series' seismic content, is…
Why Structural Engineers Are Being Asked to Think About Carbon the Way They Think About Loads
A Genuine Shift in How a Design Variable Gets Treated For most of structural engineering's modern history, a design's success…
Building on Mars: Radiation, Dust, and a Third of Earth’s Gravity
A Different Set of Extremes From the Moon's Martian structural design shares some challenges with the lunar habitat problem discussed…
Structural Engineering on the Moon: What a Lunar Habitat Actually Has to Resist
A Genuinely Different Load Environment From Anything on Earth Lunar structural design starts from load conditions with essentially no direct…
1-Kilometre-Tall Buildings: What Actually Stops Us From Building Them Today
Already Closer Than Intuition Suggests The tallest completed buildings today already approach the 850-metre range, and a kilometre-tall building —…
Space Elevators and Megastructures: What’s Physics and What’s Still Fiction
An Idea That's Genuinely Old, and Genuinely Serious Engineering Literature Exists On It The space elevator concept — a cable…
Laser Scanning and Reality Capture: Keeping As-Built Structures Honest
Why 'As-Built' Drawings Are Often Not Actually As-Built Construction rarely proceeds in perfect, unerring agreement with the design drawings —…
Circular Economy Principles Applied to Structural Steel Reuse
Steel's Head Start on Circularity, and Why It's Still Underused Structural steel already has a genuine circularity advantage most other…
Underwater and Underground: Structures Designed to Never See the Sky
Why Building Downward and Underwater Is Gaining Renewed Attention As dense urban areas run short of buildable surface land, and…
Shape-Memory Alloys in Structural Applications: Self-Centering Connections
A Material That Remembers Its Original Shape Shape-memory alloys (SMAs, most commonly a nickel-titanium alloy known as Nitinol in structural…