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Why Buildings Fall Down: How Structures Fail
Once upon a time, seven wonders of the world stood tall and brilliant and, it must have seemed, would stand forever, impervious to time and gravity. Now only one remains--the pyramid at Khufu, in the Egyptian desert near Cairo. All of the others have fallen down.
Modern technologies, computerized designs, and new materials have minimized structural failures nearly to the vanishing point. Even so, we can learn from ancient as well as recent history. Why Buildings Fall Down chronicles the how and why of the most important and interesting structural failures in history and especially in the twentieth century.
Not even all of the pyramids are still with us. The Pyramid of Meidum has shed 2,500,000 tons of limestone and continues to disintegrate. Beginning there our authors, both world-renowned structural engineers, take us on a guided tour of enlightening structural failures--buildings of all kinds, from ancient domes like Istanbul's Hagia Sophia to the state of the art Hartford Civic Arena, from the man-caused destruction of the Parthenon to the earthquake damage of 1989 in Armenia and San Francisco, the Connecticut Thruway bridge collapse at Mianus, and one of the most fatal structural disasters in American the fall of the Hyatt Regency ballroom walkways in Kansas City.
Buildings have fallen throughout history whether made of wood, steel, reinforced concrete, or stone. But these failures do respect the laws of physics. All are the result of static load or dynamic forces, earthquakes, temperature changes, uneven settlements of the soil, or other unforeseen forces. A few are even due to natural phenomena that engineers and scientists are still unable to explain or predict.
The stories that make up Why Buildings Fall Down are, finally, very human ones, tales of the interaction of people and nature, of architects, engineers, builders, materials, and natural forces, all coming together in sometimes dramatic and always instructive ways in the places where we live and work and have our lives.
Modern technologies, computerized designs, and new materials have minimized structural failures nearly to the vanishing point. Even so, we can learn from ancient as well as recent history. Why Buildings Fall Down chronicles the how and why of the most important and interesting structural failures in history and especially in the twentieth century.
Not even all of the pyramids are still with us. The Pyramid of Meidum has shed 2,500,000 tons of limestone and continues to disintegrate. Beginning there our authors, both world-renowned structural engineers, take us on a guided tour of enlightening structural failures--buildings of all kinds, from ancient domes like Istanbul's Hagia Sophia to the state of the art Hartford Civic Arena, from the man-caused destruction of the Parthenon to the earthquake damage of 1989 in Armenia and San Francisco, the Connecticut Thruway bridge collapse at Mianus, and one of the most fatal structural disasters in American the fall of the Hyatt Regency ballroom walkways in Kansas City.
Buildings have fallen throughout history whether made of wood, steel, reinforced concrete, or stone. But these failures do respect the laws of physics. All are the result of static load or dynamic forces, earthquakes, temperature changes, uneven settlements of the soil, or other unforeseen forces. A few are even due to natural phenomena that engineers and scientists are still unable to explain or predict.
The stories that make up Why Buildings Fall Down are, finally, very human ones, tales of the interaction of people and nature, of architects, engineers, builders, materials, and natural forces, all coming together in sometimes dramatic and always instructive ways in the places where we live and work and have our lives.
334 pages, Hardcover
First published June 1, 1992
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2126 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 63 reviews
August 25, 2013
The topic is lovely: the details of structural failures. The author is an expert, able to draw on his rich career experiences and with amusing anecdotes, like when the opposing-party attorney asked the court to stop calling him "Doctor", since "who knows what a PhD from the University of Rome means or if it's comparable to an American doctorate." (The attorney was overruled.)
The writing is very uneven, however. Some topics are treated in great detail; others are glossed over superficially without any real explanation of why. And the author likes to go on historical tangents. In general, this book would have benefitted from more aggressive editing.
The writing is very uneven, however. Some topics are treated in great detail; others are glossed over superficially without any real explanation of why. And the author likes to go on historical tangents. In general, this book would have benefitted from more aggressive editing.
September 6, 2009
Why did the pyramid at Meidum shed 250,000 tons of limestone outer casings when few of the others have? Why is the pyramid shape a logical structure for a country where the only available building material is stone? Those and many other questions are answered in a fascinating book by Matthys Levy. The bottom blocks of a pyramid must support the weight of all the blocks above it; those on top support only their own weight, much like a mountain. The classical 52o angle was adopted only after it was understood that the foundation had to be laid on limestone. At Meidum, the bottom layers and foundation were supported by sand, and the casing blocks lay in horizontal layers and were not inclined inward, unlike in all the pyramids that followed.
The light, airy dome has replaced the pyramid as man's alternative to monolithic monuments. The dome originated thirty-three hundred years ago in Assyria. By 200 A.D., the Roman Pantheon represented the peak of the builders' skill. In 1420, Filippo Brunelleschi completed the dome over the Santa Maria de Fiore without using a scaffold. What gives domes their stability and permanence is their curved continuous shape. Unlike arches that require enormous buttresses, the dome shares the load among all its members. They are exceptionally strong and support gravity loads well. Their rigidity makes them susceptible to earthquakes and soil settlement, however. The advent of Christian liturgical requirements, i.e., the cross shape of many buildings, posed great difficulties for medieval builders who wished to incorporate the dome into religious structures. Eggshells, which are difficult to squash when pressed from the ends toward the middle, are really just two domes glued together. The ratio of an eggshell's span to thickness is about 30. That of a conservatively designed dome is usually at least 300, or about ten times stronger.
The book analyzes assorted structural failures. The collapse of the dome at the C.W. Post College of Long Island University provides an interesting example of how a dome that met and exceeded code standards could still collapse because of a failure to anticipate natural conditions. The assumption behind the design was that snow loads on the roof would be uniform. During the storm that collapsed the roof, an east wind blew snow in huge drifts on one side of the dome, stressing it beyond design limits. That, coupled with the natural lifting effect caused by wind passing over the top of a dome (much like a sail) caused the structural members to fail. So even though the total snow load was one-quarter the maximum, it was concentrated on less than one-third of the dome's structure, bringing it down.
A particularly interesting section describes how tuned, dynamic dampers work in large buildings and why they are necessary. All tall buildings oscillate because of the pressure of the wind. This movement, while not necessarily structurally dangerous — although it can be — can cause airsickness in the occupants. A huge tuned (set to the same frequency as the oscillations of the building) concrete block is set on a thin layer of oil at the top of the building. It is connected to the outer walls by enormous steel springs and shock absorbers. When the building begins to oscillate, the damper tends to stay put because of its large inertia and allows the building to slide under it on the layer of oil. The springs on one side of the damper become longer and literally pull the building back into shape. Those on the other side push it to its original position.
Thermal stresses must also be considered in building and bridge design. As steel beams in a bridge expand from the heat in summer, the bridge must be permitted to expand by using rollers, or the compression caused by the prevention of expansion would reduce the carrying capacity. Air-conditioned buildings pose unique problems because the outside beams may be expanding while the inside beams are contracting because of the temperature differential. This can cause unwanted bending unless structural reinforcement is present.
The chapter on dams is instructive. Many earthen dams, built centuries ago, have survived thousands of years. The Romans built numerous masonry dams on a base three to four times the width of the dam's height. It remained for a Scottish engineer in the 19th century to show that the base width need be no more than the height. Of 1,764 dams built in the United States before 1959, one in fifty failed for a variety of reasons, a rather high failure rate. The most famous collapse is that of the Johnstown dam in 1889, which killed more than three thousand people. It had been completed in 1853 and was intended to provide a steady source of water for a Pennsylvania canal. By 1860, the canal was already obsolete; railroads were taking over the hauling of freight. Soon the dam was in a state of disrepair. When it was sold to new owners they made dangerous modifications that reduced the spillway to less than one-third of its original capacity. The five-inch rainfall that was blamed for the dam's failure would never have destroyed the dam in its original configuration.
The light, airy dome has replaced the pyramid as man's alternative to monolithic monuments. The dome originated thirty-three hundred years ago in Assyria. By 200 A.D., the Roman Pantheon represented the peak of the builders' skill. In 1420, Filippo Brunelleschi completed the dome over the Santa Maria de Fiore without using a scaffold. What gives domes their stability and permanence is their curved continuous shape. Unlike arches that require enormous buttresses, the dome shares the load among all its members. They are exceptionally strong and support gravity loads well. Their rigidity makes them susceptible to earthquakes and soil settlement, however. The advent of Christian liturgical requirements, i.e., the cross shape of many buildings, posed great difficulties for medieval builders who wished to incorporate the dome into religious structures. Eggshells, which are difficult to squash when pressed from the ends toward the middle, are really just two domes glued together. The ratio of an eggshell's span to thickness is about 30. That of a conservatively designed dome is usually at least 300, or about ten times stronger.
The book analyzes assorted structural failures. The collapse of the dome at the C.W. Post College of Long Island University provides an interesting example of how a dome that met and exceeded code standards could still collapse because of a failure to anticipate natural conditions. The assumption behind the design was that snow loads on the roof would be uniform. During the storm that collapsed the roof, an east wind blew snow in huge drifts on one side of the dome, stressing it beyond design limits. That, coupled with the natural lifting effect caused by wind passing over the top of a dome (much like a sail) caused the structural members to fail. So even though the total snow load was one-quarter the maximum, it was concentrated on less than one-third of the dome's structure, bringing it down.
A particularly interesting section describes how tuned, dynamic dampers work in large buildings and why they are necessary. All tall buildings oscillate because of the pressure of the wind. This movement, while not necessarily structurally dangerous — although it can be — can cause airsickness in the occupants. A huge tuned (set to the same frequency as the oscillations of the building) concrete block is set on a thin layer of oil at the top of the building. It is connected to the outer walls by enormous steel springs and shock absorbers. When the building begins to oscillate, the damper tends to stay put because of its large inertia and allows the building to slide under it on the layer of oil. The springs on one side of the damper become longer and literally pull the building back into shape. Those on the other side push it to its original position.
Thermal stresses must also be considered in building and bridge design. As steel beams in a bridge expand from the heat in summer, the bridge must be permitted to expand by using rollers, or the compression caused by the prevention of expansion would reduce the carrying capacity. Air-conditioned buildings pose unique problems because the outside beams may be expanding while the inside beams are contracting because of the temperature differential. This can cause unwanted bending unless structural reinforcement is present.
The chapter on dams is instructive. Many earthen dams, built centuries ago, have survived thousands of years. The Romans built numerous masonry dams on a base three to four times the width of the dam's height. It remained for a Scottish engineer in the 19th century to show that the base width need be no more than the height. Of 1,764 dams built in the United States before 1959, one in fifty failed for a variety of reasons, a rather high failure rate. The most famous collapse is that of the Johnstown dam in 1889, which killed more than three thousand people. It had been completed in 1853 and was intended to provide a steady source of water for a Pennsylvania canal. By 1860, the canal was already obsolete; railroads were taking over the hauling of freight. Soon the dam was in a state of disrepair. When it was sold to new owners they made dangerous modifications that reduced the spillway to less than one-third of its original capacity. The five-inch rainfall that was blamed for the dam's failure would never have destroyed the dam in its original configuration.
January 26, 2025
I thought this book was so interesting, and I liked getting to look at different scenarios and know the history of different building failures. This book was technical enough that I wasn't annoyed but simple enough that someone who doesn't know anything could still enjoy it. The appendices give little explanations on some commonly referenced topics (such as material properties, stress and strain, etc) and they were like little mini engineering lessons. This book had lots of pictures, which I appreciated because visualizing things just from words is not my strong suit
October 14, 2022
Last month, I finished Why Buildings Fall Down: How Structures Fail by Matthys Levy and Mario Salvadori. Levy is a Swiss master structural designer and a professor of Civil Engineering at Columbia University. He was named a Structural Engineering Legend in Design by Structural Engineering Magazine in 2003. Salvadori, his co-author, was an American structural engineer and professor of both civil engineering and architecture at Columbia University. The book was written in 1987.
Salvadori decided to embark on this project after writing his well-received book, Why Buildings Stand Up. He had given a copy of the book to his mother-in-law, who, upon receiving it on her ninety-second birthday, said matter-of-factly: “This is nice, but I would be much more interested in reading why they fall down.” My kind of person!
Using easy-to-understand language but still far below what a non-Engineering-inclined mind would find attractive, the authors examined buildings of all kinds, from ancient domes like Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia to the state-of-the-art Hartford Civic Arena. They dissected why they failed to continue to stand.
I liked their description of what comprises a building in the opening pages. A building is conceived when designed, born when built, alive while standing, dead from old age or an unexpected accident. It breathes through the mouth of its windows and the lungs of its air-conditioning system. It circulates fluids through the veins and arteries of its pipes and sends messages to all parts of its body through the nervous system of its electric wires. A building reacts to changes in its outer or inner conditions through its brain of feedback systems, is protected by the skin of its facade, supported by the skeleton of its columns, beams, and slabs, and rests on the feet of its foundations. Like most human bodies, most buildings have full lives and then die.
In other words, just like humans, buildings are designed to die. Their duration of existence depends on different factors, some of which may not be the designers’ fault. But any accidental death of a building is always due to the failure of its skeleton, the structure.
For instance, why did the pyramid at Meidum in Egypt shed 250,000 tons of limestone outer casings when the other pyramids did not? Why is the shape of the pyramids like that? These and many other questions are answered in the first chapter.
#WILT Do you know that the pyramids were filled with the most precious possessions in the belief that the dead had to be surrounded by all the conveniences of life to be happy? Even when the pyramids were enclosed with ingenious stone doors to prevent thievery, thieves, smarter than the police, still looted the treasures in droves throughout the thirty Egyptian dynasties.
Some other bits of knowledge jump at you as you read the book. Those who watch movies about Egyptian Mummies would remember the name, Imhotep. This name belongs to the greatest mathematician and engineer in Egyptian history. His design of the Great Pyramid at Gizeh in the Fourth Dynasty was imitated in all technical details in all later pyramids. He was so good that he was made a god and venerated by the Egyptians for three thousand years.
A book about structural failures can be expected to be filled with the analysis of assorted structural failures. The dome collapse at the C.W. Post College of Long Island University is an intriguing illustration of how a dome could still fall while meeting and exceeding code standards due to a failure to account for natural factors. The assumption behind the design was that snow would fall uniformly, just as we often have with rain. In the same building, rain falling on one part of the building is expected to be uniform with the other parts. But that was not what happened with this building. During the storm that collapsed the roof, an east wind blew snow in huge drifts on one side of the dome, stressing it beyond design limits. That, coupled with the natural lifting effect caused by wind passing over the top of a dome, caused the structural members to fail. So even though the total snow load was one-quarter the maximum, it was concentrated on less than one-third of the dome’s structure, bringing it down.
The building of domes is an impressive work of engineering. I learnt of Dante Bini, who is undoubtedly the builder of the largest number of domes in history, more than fifteen hundred in twenty-three countries, from Italy to Australia and from Japan to Israel. Curiously, none were built in the United States for specific reasons. Want to know? Read the book.
Domes are stable and permanent due to their continuous, curving shape. Unlike arches, which need substantial buttresses, the dome distributes the load among all its elements. They can withstand heavy weights thanks to their extraordinary strength. Do you want to know how strong a dome is? Try to squash an egg by pressing its ends towards the middle. It’s incredibly difficult. Eggs are really just two domes glued together. The ratio of an eggshell’s span to thickness is about 30. That of a conservatively designed dome is usually at least 300, or about ten times stronger. However, the rigidity of domes makes them vulnerable to quakes and soil subsidence. More domes would have been built except that Christian liturgical requirements, including the need to have the shape of the cross on buildings, posed great difficulties for medieval builders who wished to incorporate the dome into religious structures.
An engineering mind would enjoy the chapter on dynamic dampers in large buildings. All tall buildings oscillate because of the pressure of the wind. While not always dangerous for the structure, although it can be, this movement can make the occupants of the building queasy. On top of the structure is a sizable tuned concrete block placed there to match the frequency of the building’s oscillations. Huge steel springs and shock absorbers hold it to the exterior walls. Due to its high inertia, the damper tends to remain in place when the building oscillates, allowing the structure to slide beneath it on the oil layer. The building is pulled back into shape by the longer springs on one side of the damper. The springs on the opposing side force it back to its starting position.
The context the authors gave for many of the engineering decisions helped. There is the revelation that a stadium rooftop was re-designed partly because flaws in the city sewer system prevented the efficient disposition of significant rainfall. The fact that the rainfall could not be evacuated on time led to the collapse of the structure, which would have killed up to 14,000 people had the collapse happened at night. Only hours before, tens of thousands of people were gathered under that roof. That narration was indeed good. If more of the book was like that some of those who abandoned the book with me as I read would have tarried a while longer.
For some structures, the question is not really why they fail; the right question is why they survived for as long as they did. There was a structure, by post-collapse analysis, that should have failed 6 years earlier. It stood partly because of a term known as progressive collapse. Progressive collapse can start as the result of even a minor deficiency unless redundancy is introduced as a matter of structural insurance.
Redundancy is a quality that we should hope is embedded in all of the structures we find ourselves stepping in. Redundancy ensures that even when a part of the building cannot bear the load imposed on the structure, the other parts of the building can receive the load from that part and distribute it among one another. In more technical terms, redundancy implies that a structure can carry loads by more than one mechanism- that the forces on it can follow alternate paths to the ground. It guarantees that loads can still be carried by other mechanisms if one mechanism fails. Many structures have collapsed because the design and development did not build into them enough redundancy. There was the case of a structure where the introduction of less than 50 reinforcement bars (what you call iron) would have prevented the fall of a multi-million-dollar structure.
Sometimes, the reader learns that even though ancient structures may have stood for thousands of years, scientific calculations can make us build more efficient ones. For instance, earthen dams built by the Romans centuries ago survived thousands of years because, according to them, their bases were three to four times the width of the dam’s height. However, engineering calculations by a Scottish engineer in the 19th century showed that the base width need be no more than the height. The beauty of modern technology.
As a public affairs analyst of the Nigerian space, several times, I shook my head reading the investigation results. There were cases where building collapse led to the reevaluation of building regulations worldwide in terms of both safety and unusual loads. How many times have buildings collapsed in Nigeria, experts were called to make recommendations, and the recommendations set aside only for the same kind of failure to occur again, sometimes within the same region of the previous ones?
There was the case wherein a startling afterword to a disaster revealed evidence of incredibly shoddy workmanship as the tower was demolished. Upon this revelation, hundreds of similarly built apartment towers were deemed unsafe and demolished. There were no ifs and buts.
As someone who studied engineering and still practices, the book was definitely worthwhile. It would be if you’re interested in learning how a small and subtle design flaw or change can cause a building to fail. Consider the walkway collapse caused by the builders changing the configuration of a certain nut/washer such that it had to carry twice the design weight. The walkway collapsed, and several people died. It causes you to appreciate effective government regulation. The book is structured so that the authors give each chapter a subject and bring examples to make their points.
Because the book was written in 1987, you will not see any analysis of the building collapses that have captured our imagination in recent times, such as the Twin Towers in the USA, the Sampoong Department Store in South Korea and the three High-Rise Office Buildings in Brazil. I would have loved to see the analysis of the failure of Lotus Riverside Compound in China. This case was fascinating because one of eleven 13-story apartment buildings in Shanghai toppled over, completely intact, as if a huge tree was uprooted by a giant. I would love to see the revised version of this book someday covering more recent cases. But I wonder how that would happen with one of the authors dead.
I learnt this is a required book in some schools for construction degrees. I would recommend it to be read by every structural engineer in Nigeria.
Salvadori decided to embark on this project after writing his well-received book, Why Buildings Stand Up. He had given a copy of the book to his mother-in-law, who, upon receiving it on her ninety-second birthday, said matter-of-factly: “This is nice, but I would be much more interested in reading why they fall down.” My kind of person!
Using easy-to-understand language but still far below what a non-Engineering-inclined mind would find attractive, the authors examined buildings of all kinds, from ancient domes like Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia to the state-of-the-art Hartford Civic Arena. They dissected why they failed to continue to stand.
I liked their description of what comprises a building in the opening pages. A building is conceived when designed, born when built, alive while standing, dead from old age or an unexpected accident. It breathes through the mouth of its windows and the lungs of its air-conditioning system. It circulates fluids through the veins and arteries of its pipes and sends messages to all parts of its body through the nervous system of its electric wires. A building reacts to changes in its outer or inner conditions through its brain of feedback systems, is protected by the skin of its facade, supported by the skeleton of its columns, beams, and slabs, and rests on the feet of its foundations. Like most human bodies, most buildings have full lives and then die.
In other words, just like humans, buildings are designed to die. Their duration of existence depends on different factors, some of which may not be the designers’ fault. But any accidental death of a building is always due to the failure of its skeleton, the structure.
For instance, why did the pyramid at Meidum in Egypt shed 250,000 tons of limestone outer casings when the other pyramids did not? Why is the shape of the pyramids like that? These and many other questions are answered in the first chapter.
#WILT Do you know that the pyramids were filled with the most precious possessions in the belief that the dead had to be surrounded by all the conveniences of life to be happy? Even when the pyramids were enclosed with ingenious stone doors to prevent thievery, thieves, smarter than the police, still looted the treasures in droves throughout the thirty Egyptian dynasties.
Some other bits of knowledge jump at you as you read the book. Those who watch movies about Egyptian Mummies would remember the name, Imhotep. This name belongs to the greatest mathematician and engineer in Egyptian history. His design of the Great Pyramid at Gizeh in the Fourth Dynasty was imitated in all technical details in all later pyramids. He was so good that he was made a god and venerated by the Egyptians for three thousand years.
A book about structural failures can be expected to be filled with the analysis of assorted structural failures. The dome collapse at the C.W. Post College of Long Island University is an intriguing illustration of how a dome could still fall while meeting and exceeding code standards due to a failure to account for natural factors. The assumption behind the design was that snow would fall uniformly, just as we often have with rain. In the same building, rain falling on one part of the building is expected to be uniform with the other parts. But that was not what happened with this building. During the storm that collapsed the roof, an east wind blew snow in huge drifts on one side of the dome, stressing it beyond design limits. That, coupled with the natural lifting effect caused by wind passing over the top of a dome, caused the structural members to fail. So even though the total snow load was one-quarter the maximum, it was concentrated on less than one-third of the dome’s structure, bringing it down.
The building of domes is an impressive work of engineering. I learnt of Dante Bini, who is undoubtedly the builder of the largest number of domes in history, more than fifteen hundred in twenty-three countries, from Italy to Australia and from Japan to Israel. Curiously, none were built in the United States for specific reasons. Want to know? Read the book.
Domes are stable and permanent due to their continuous, curving shape. Unlike arches, which need substantial buttresses, the dome distributes the load among all its elements. They can withstand heavy weights thanks to their extraordinary strength. Do you want to know how strong a dome is? Try to squash an egg by pressing its ends towards the middle. It’s incredibly difficult. Eggs are really just two domes glued together. The ratio of an eggshell’s span to thickness is about 30. That of a conservatively designed dome is usually at least 300, or about ten times stronger. However, the rigidity of domes makes them vulnerable to quakes and soil subsidence. More domes would have been built except that Christian liturgical requirements, including the need to have the shape of the cross on buildings, posed great difficulties for medieval builders who wished to incorporate the dome into religious structures.
An engineering mind would enjoy the chapter on dynamic dampers in large buildings. All tall buildings oscillate because of the pressure of the wind. While not always dangerous for the structure, although it can be, this movement can make the occupants of the building queasy. On top of the structure is a sizable tuned concrete block placed there to match the frequency of the building’s oscillations. Huge steel springs and shock absorbers hold it to the exterior walls. Due to its high inertia, the damper tends to remain in place when the building oscillates, allowing the structure to slide beneath it on the oil layer. The building is pulled back into shape by the longer springs on one side of the damper. The springs on the opposing side force it back to its starting position.
The context the authors gave for many of the engineering decisions helped. There is the revelation that a stadium rooftop was re-designed partly because flaws in the city sewer system prevented the efficient disposition of significant rainfall. The fact that the rainfall could not be evacuated on time led to the collapse of the structure, which would have killed up to 14,000 people had the collapse happened at night. Only hours before, tens of thousands of people were gathered under that roof. That narration was indeed good. If more of the book was like that some of those who abandoned the book with me as I read would have tarried a while longer.
For some structures, the question is not really why they fail; the right question is why they survived for as long as they did. There was a structure, by post-collapse analysis, that should have failed 6 years earlier. It stood partly because of a term known as progressive collapse. Progressive collapse can start as the result of even a minor deficiency unless redundancy is introduced as a matter of structural insurance.
Redundancy is a quality that we should hope is embedded in all of the structures we find ourselves stepping in. Redundancy ensures that even when a part of the building cannot bear the load imposed on the structure, the other parts of the building can receive the load from that part and distribute it among one another. In more technical terms, redundancy implies that a structure can carry loads by more than one mechanism- that the forces on it can follow alternate paths to the ground. It guarantees that loads can still be carried by other mechanisms if one mechanism fails. Many structures have collapsed because the design and development did not build into them enough redundancy. There was the case of a structure where the introduction of less than 50 reinforcement bars (what you call iron) would have prevented the fall of a multi-million-dollar structure.
Sometimes, the reader learns that even though ancient structures may have stood for thousands of years, scientific calculations can make us build more efficient ones. For instance, earthen dams built by the Romans centuries ago survived thousands of years because, according to them, their bases were three to four times the width of the dam’s height. However, engineering calculations by a Scottish engineer in the 19th century showed that the base width need be no more than the height. The beauty of modern technology.
As a public affairs analyst of the Nigerian space, several times, I shook my head reading the investigation results. There were cases where building collapse led to the reevaluation of building regulations worldwide in terms of both safety and unusual loads. How many times have buildings collapsed in Nigeria, experts were called to make recommendations, and the recommendations set aside only for the same kind of failure to occur again, sometimes within the same region of the previous ones?
There was the case wherein a startling afterword to a disaster revealed evidence of incredibly shoddy workmanship as the tower was demolished. Upon this revelation, hundreds of similarly built apartment towers were deemed unsafe and demolished. There were no ifs and buts.
As someone who studied engineering and still practices, the book was definitely worthwhile. It would be if you’re interested in learning how a small and subtle design flaw or change can cause a building to fail. Consider the walkway collapse caused by the builders changing the configuration of a certain nut/washer such that it had to carry twice the design weight. The walkway collapsed, and several people died. It causes you to appreciate effective government regulation. The book is structured so that the authors give each chapter a subject and bring examples to make their points.
Because the book was written in 1987, you will not see any analysis of the building collapses that have captured our imagination in recent times, such as the Twin Towers in the USA, the Sampoong Department Store in South Korea and the three High-Rise Office Buildings in Brazil. I would have loved to see the analysis of the failure of Lotus Riverside Compound in China. This case was fascinating because one of eleven 13-story apartment buildings in Shanghai toppled over, completely intact, as if a huge tree was uprooted by a giant. I would love to see the revised version of this book someday covering more recent cases. But I wonder how that would happen with one of the authors dead.
I learnt this is a required book in some schools for construction degrees. I would recommend it to be read by every structural engineer in Nigeria.
Read
September 15, 2023DNF
November 16, 2015
The technical discussion on architectural development are implicit throughout this thoroughly researched read. The expert opinion, the analytical skills, the discussion of mechanical stress, and the other forms of gravity and strain, and many integral aspects of design and infrastructural development are critical to the solid foundation for a building. What is also taking into consideration are environmental elements that need to be built into the design plans, and a well developed understanding to physics and engineering principles.
August 1, 2020
Levi and Salvadori illustrate principles of structural engineering by showing many of the ways things go wrong. Examples include dams, bridges, and an aircraft as well as buildings. Causes of failure considered include natural events (e.g. ground shifting, heavy snow), inexperienced workers, old age, and many cases of simple lack of planning -- and of course, many cases have more than one contributing cause. Though design for earthquakes gets plenty of coverage, the authors do not mention hurricanes or tornadoes. Since this edition was written before 2001, it does not include the most famous building collapse. The book would not lose much if the chapter on courtroom experiences were left out. Appendices (46 pages) explain basic engineering principles concisely.
July 21, 2025
Pensé que seria un libro fácil de entender para personas que, como yo, no tienen nada de conocimientos teóricos o prácticos sobre ingeniería y/o construcción, pero la mayor parte del tiempo me bombardeó con conceptos y términos que desconocía, que si bien, el libro trata de explicar (sobre todo en la especie de glosario que viene al final), la verdad es que te termina abrumando.
Las partes en las que cuenta más como historias de sucesos y accidentes ingenieriles las disfruté más sin entrar en detalles técnicos. A pesar de todo, se agradece la calidad de la información y de las ilustraciones que acompañan. Sería un libro mucho más recomendable a alguien que esté empezando sus estudios en ingeniería o arquitectura, o alguien que sea más conocedor de estos temas.
Las partes en las que cuenta más como historias de sucesos y accidentes ingenieriles las disfruté más sin entrar en detalles técnicos. A pesar de todo, se agradece la calidad de la información y de las ilustraciones que acompañan. Sería un libro mucho más recomendable a alguien que esté empezando sus estudios en ingeniería o arquitectura, o alguien que sea más conocedor de estos temas.
July 14, 2017
Structural engineering is a tricky thing. A vast majority of buildings stay up, but this book discusses the multitude of factors that can contribute into failures. Definitely a worthwhile read if you're interested in learning how a small and subtle design flaw or change can cause a building to fail.
Presented as a loose collection of failure modes and examples, the reader is probably well served to read the appendixes first to get a basic refresher of the physics and engineering behind the examples.
Presented as a loose collection of failure modes and examples, the reader is probably well served to read the appendixes first to get a basic refresher of the physics and engineering behind the examples.
June 7, 2022
This is a fascinating book about a wide range of structural failures. Many of the examples were well known to me, and others I had never come across before. I like how the book is structured, the authors give each chapter a subject, and bring examples in to make their points. What is good about this book is that it can be enjoyed whether or not you have a background in structural engineering. If you are interested in engineering and structures, you will enjoy this book, even without formal education in the field.
January 1, 2021
This read like a very dated book and not very well written. The concepts are still current and the physics of static loads and wind shear were interesting but I couldn't get too excited while in this book. Hopefully new editions have some better visuals and diagrams of these structures. I am showing my unfamiliarity with many of these theories and hopefully other people can make more sense of it than I could.
April 20, 2019
Read this multiple times, always with wonder and amazement at the seemingly-insignificant details that cause major disaster. Like the walkway collapse that was caused by the builders changing the configuration of a joint such that a certain nut/washer had to carry twice the design weight. Oops. And people die.
Tends to make one appreciate government regulation.
Tends to make one appreciate government regulation.
September 13, 2024
An excellent book from the early 90's that examines specific failures of various structures to explain the general concepts. Certainly of its time, with pencil line drawings instead of 3D model pictures, I was engaged by thinking of the structural collapses more recently and how they are unfortunately related.
December 4, 2018
I read "Why Buildings Fall Down" for a course I took on this subject. It deals with the topic by studying examples, such as bridge failures, plane crashes, and so forth. It's not stylish, but it's interesting, and it was perfectly fine for the course.
July 8, 2020
Lovelly book for those who are in the pathology of the buildings, it’s a shame that it does not include any real photo of the cases that expose througout the book. Still a nice book for understanding why buildings failed.
May 8, 2022
Really interesting book about structures. It is an accessible book on the mechanics of buildings and how design (and design flaws) can translate to a building standing or falling.
I enjoyed the real-world examples that illustrate each concept.
I enjoyed the real-world examples that illustrate each concept.
January 31, 2024
By now it must be obvious to the reader that the minute details of the design of the hanger assemblies have been so carefully described because they may have had an important role in the failure of the arena roof.
June 27, 2017
Great introduction. Would love to see another revised version one day
May 3, 2020
Book felt a bit all over the place, jumping from the topic at hand, to stories about bridges (not buildings) falling to his arguments in court.
December 2, 2022
A terrific book. Highly recommended. An interesting subject and very well and engagingly written.
May 29, 2023
Fascinating! An examination of a variety of buildings, bridge, and dam failures.
July 10, 2023
An enjoyably well written mix of the technical and the understandable. Easy enough to understand, technical enough to learn something.
April 20, 2025
This book is really insightful into what causes different structures to fail.
It's written in a way that even someone who's never done any engineering could understand.
It's written in a way that even someone who's never done any engineering could understand.
April 27, 2025
Read this book if you want to question every building in sight
February 20, 2020
Engineering sounds boring but not in this case.
Using examples we've read about in the papers, the authors explain how something was built and what went wrong to cause the failure.
It gave me an insight into how things work s I see more whenI look at buildings, bridges, etc.
Well written, actually reads quickly. Plain language, no math or physics.
Using examples we've read about in the papers, the authors explain how something was built and what went wrong to cause the failure.
It gave me an insight into how things work s I see more whenI look at buildings, bridges, etc.
Well written, actually reads quickly. Plain language, no math or physics.
November 1, 2013
This nonfiction book is about the explanations of why structures, like bridges and buildings, fall down/fail. The author's intent is to educate the reader about past structures failing. The author explains why they fail, like if the design was poor or the rust problem was ignored. He also wants to educate the reader about the forces that were incorporated in the time before the structure fails. The problem that this book talks about is that many buildings have fallen over the years, hurting hundreds of people. The solution to this problem is educating the future. We cannot change our past, but we can learn from those mistakes to not repeat them. This is precisely what this book is doing, it is educating the future about past mistakes. So we do not make the same ones. The author organizes and writes this information in a case study style. This means that he takes previous information and explains it while also talking about what was done wrong and why did it bring the structure to the ground.
I learned about different forces that structures experience. Some of these forces are tension, compression, and gravity. I also learned that many metal structures fail because of metal fatigue. I also learned something about myself. I learned that I need pictures to understand the complex ideas of non-fiction. Without pictures I feel like I get lost or confused. I liked the pictures/diagrams in the book. They were detailed, but not too complex. Though I disliked the complex vocabulary and lack of following definitions. When reading you had to stop and use another source to define the terms. It made reading less enjoyable.
I would recommend this book to anyone who likes civil engineering books because this book deals with the forces and constructions a civil engineer would deal with. I would also recommend this to someone between the ages of 12-16 because the vocabulary is advanced but it would be too simple for a 16 year old. I would recommend this for both genders because a girl or boy could like civil engineering. Overall this book was very informative and in depth, but if you read it be ready for a vocabulary quiz.
I learned about different forces that structures experience. Some of these forces are tension, compression, and gravity. I also learned that many metal structures fail because of metal fatigue. I also learned something about myself. I learned that I need pictures to understand the complex ideas of non-fiction. Without pictures I feel like I get lost or confused. I liked the pictures/diagrams in the book. They were detailed, but not too complex. Though I disliked the complex vocabulary and lack of following definitions. When reading you had to stop and use another source to define the terms. It made reading less enjoyable.
I would recommend this book to anyone who likes civil engineering books because this book deals with the forces and constructions a civil engineer would deal with. I would also recommend this to someone between the ages of 12-16 because the vocabulary is advanced but it would be too simple for a 16 year old. I would recommend this for both genders because a girl or boy could like civil engineering. Overall this book was very informative and in depth, but if you read it be ready for a vocabulary quiz.
November 10, 2008
I learned some really interesting things about architecture and buildings and all the different jobs it takes to build a building/structure. The beginning of chapter 16 sums up all the ways that buildings fall down the best: "We build structures with the faith that they will last forever...the forces of nature and human error often conspire to confound our optimism and cause structural failures...pressure of population growth, our lack of respect for the past, or our belief that violence solves some problems. These include neglect, abandonment, replacement, and war."
Yup, I figure all those things just about cover the rest of the book without getting into the technical stuff. Which tended to put me to sleep, even when I was trying to pay attention.
I did find the whole book really interesting. My favorite was the building in Mexico that was built at ground level, then the weight of the building pushed the water out of the soil underneath the building, so the building sank 6 feet and they had to build stairs down to the front door. And then, 20 or so years later, there were a lot of buildings built in the surrounding area, and the building rose 12 feet and they built stairs to go up to get inside.
The really nice thing about this book was how they always told the end of the story to each failure. They include the results from court cases and the effect such things had on those investigating the causes. Like the guys who would cross the street at one corner just to cross back at the next in order to avoid a certain building they knew had pieces of the facade not attached properly. The authors tried not to get terribly technical, otherwise I wouldn't have been able to get through it.
Yup, I figure all those things just about cover the rest of the book without getting into the technical stuff. Which tended to put me to sleep, even when I was trying to pay attention.
I did find the whole book really interesting. My favorite was the building in Mexico that was built at ground level, then the weight of the building pushed the water out of the soil underneath the building, so the building sank 6 feet and they had to build stairs down to the front door. And then, 20 or so years later, there were a lot of buildings built in the surrounding area, and the building rose 12 feet and they built stairs to go up to get inside.
The really nice thing about this book was how they always told the end of the story to each failure. They include the results from court cases and the effect such things had on those investigating the causes. Like the guys who would cross the street at one corner just to cross back at the next in order to avoid a certain building they knew had pieces of the facade not attached properly. The authors tried not to get terribly technical, otherwise I wouldn't have been able to get through it.
Read
July 29, 2011Very good. Although it starts out a bit slow, Mr. Levy and Mr Salvadori really showcase a wide variety of structural failures from around the world and across a broad timeframe. It's a good read for any engineer or architect looking to learn from the mistakes of the past so as to not repeat them, and for the average person wanting to learn some of the challenges of our job.
Overall, I don't think he gets too technical for the average reader, and the prolific illustrations and appendices are helpful. Although he says at the end that the reader familiar with structural theory may want to skip the appendices, I thought there was still good information there for the engineer too (if nothing else, it gives the engineer good ideas on how to explain structural concepts to their nonstructural friends, since a lot of us aren't the best communicators).
He basically starts with ancient structures, and works his way forward to the Twin Towers, stopping at the Famous Ronan Point disaster in England, the Kemper and Hartford Arenas, The Kansas City Hyatt Regency, and the Tacoma Narrows bridge, among many others. Each failure individually makes for a quick read, and they build on one another somewhat. He covers a good cross-section of structures, from towers to arenas to bridges to apartment buildings. He also canvasses the various causes, from construction negligence to design oversight to ignorance of failure modes to terrorism.
This review is for the 2nd edition updated in 2002 to cover terrorism as cause of structural failure.
Overall, I don't think he gets too technical for the average reader, and the prolific illustrations and appendices are helpful. Although he says at the end that the reader familiar with structural theory may want to skip the appendices, I thought there was still good information there for the engineer too (if nothing else, it gives the engineer good ideas on how to explain structural concepts to their nonstructural friends, since a lot of us aren't the best communicators).
He basically starts with ancient structures, and works his way forward to the Twin Towers, stopping at the Famous Ronan Point disaster in England, the Kemper and Hartford Arenas, The Kansas City Hyatt Regency, and the Tacoma Narrows bridge, among many others. Each failure individually makes for a quick read, and they build on one another somewhat. He covers a good cross-section of structures, from towers to arenas to bridges to apartment buildings. He also canvasses the various causes, from construction negligence to design oversight to ignorance of failure modes to terrorism.
This review is for the 2nd edition updated in 2002 to cover terrorism as cause of structural failure.
January 7, 2015
I read "Why Buildings fall down by Matthys Levy.
I quite enjoyed this book, It provided an interesting mix of of architecture, and science. It promoted the idea of imperfection and learning from others mistakes. It provided reader involvement with multiple interesting tests, and experiments. Throughout the book it talked about classic works of architecture, and failed architecture examples that teach classic mistakes. This book goes through important details of building and how they could have been prevented
It talks personally to the reader and helped me understand different examples of architectural wonder. The author sends clear messages defined in each chapter, supported with real-life examples and mathematical explanations. It can get confusing at some points with complicated math explanations, but it makes up for it by explaining with well drawn sketches and images.
This book is one of my personal favorites and is easy to read certain chapters and sections without needing to read the others in chronological order. The book is both educational, inspiring, and interesting. it is one of the main books the set me on my path and goal of becoming an architect and I would recommend this for anyone interested in a architecture career.
I quite enjoyed this book, It provided an interesting mix of of architecture, and science. It promoted the idea of imperfection and learning from others mistakes. It provided reader involvement with multiple interesting tests, and experiments. Throughout the book it talked about classic works of architecture, and failed architecture examples that teach classic mistakes. This book goes through important details of building and how they could have been prevented
It talks personally to the reader and helped me understand different examples of architectural wonder. The author sends clear messages defined in each chapter, supported with real-life examples and mathematical explanations. It can get confusing at some points with complicated math explanations, but it makes up for it by explaining with well drawn sketches and images.
This book is one of my personal favorites and is easy to read certain chapters and sections without needing to read the others in chronological order. The book is both educational, inspiring, and interesting. it is one of the main books the set me on my path and goal of becoming an architect and I would recommend this for anyone interested in a architecture career.
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