It must have been a whole lot more difficult to design and build tall buildings before computers existed
It must have been a whole lot more difficult to design and build tall buildings before computers existed
32 comments
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In the book "The World Without Us" the author states that old steel bridges would be among the last human made structures left thousands of years after humas have dissapeared for the reason that they didn't have strenght calculations back then which they solved by simply overbuilding everything.
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I won't believe for a second that they didn't have the ability to calculate strength.
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Hmmm, not sure. I feel like stone erodes slower than steel oxydizes
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Slide ruling mfers
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the people who used those: computers
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I still love that the basilica cathedral, in Barcelona, was designed upside down.
Stone only works under compression. If any area ends up under tension, it will just fall apart. String only works under tension, if it is under compression, it crumples. Critically, if you invert the model, the forces invert. The basilica was designed as a string model upside down. This made mismatched forces obvious, and is easy to correct.
Historical designers had a lot of tricks, that we have mostly forgotten, to make things work.
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That's neat. I can't tell if you're talking about a specific edifice ? and whether it is a basilica or a cathedral ?
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It's the one in Barcelona. I'll edit for clarity. 👍
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What almost impresses me most is the architecture of the Parthenon in Athens. Nothing in it is perpendicular. There's a rise in the middle of the floor of about 6.5cm over a span of 30 meters that makes the floor bowed and prevents it from looking like it's sagging in the middle. All of the columns are just slightly tilted inwards. They're not straight-sided, either, they're bowed. The whole danged thing is an optical illusion to make it appear perpendicular, because it's so big that if they didn't, it wouldn't.
https://www.thearchaeologist.org/blog/6e7osxbhye9libjdlmb8std5b77rs9
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"Difficulty" is a skill issue. There are likely old-school drafting architects who could blow the doors off a CAD designer.
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My grandfather was a draftsman for one of the big military contractors back in the day. He's got some of his old work framed, it's really amazing what the human hand used to accomplish with only a straightedge and a compass... As an engineer who uses a lot of Solidworks, sometimes I romanticize and yearn to blow everything up and return to the artful days of hand-drafting as the standard.
My first job out of college was re-making tools to manufacture small electromechanical assemblies for repairing old military aircraft. (Said tools had been thrown away by some previous now-fired director who thought "We haven't used these tools in 15 years, surely we don't need them anymore...", but when the military calls up and asks for part XYZ for a B52 that you've manufactured for the last 65 years, you don't say no, even if you haven't made the part in 2 decades). I had an entire room full of B, C, and D-sized hand-drafted drawings to pull specs and dimensions from, and each one was so beautiful in its own way. Getting to spend a whole day digging through drawings was always a nice little quiet retreat from the rest of the chaotic world.
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Google the woman who worked for nasa and wrote the entire code for the rocket that took us to the moon for the first time by hand. Like literally, if I remember correctly, the picture is just a stack of lined notebooks as tall as the woman who wrote it.
Edit: saved you from the Google monster:
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My dad was an electrical engineer that worked on the Gemini & Apollo programs. He actually worked at Draper Labs in Cambridge, MA which did a lot of work for NASA.
He likes to tell the story of a coworker he shared an office with. This coworker designed a lot of the circuitry used in the rockets, and back then it was all drawn out by hand on huge sheets of paper on drafting tables. This guy was also fairly short, so he’d practically stand on a stool to reach the upper parts of the drafting table. He’d draw up various circuits, have the papers duplicated, and send the duplicates off to NASA. He kept all the originals on his desk. When it was time to draw up a new circuit he just put down a blank sheet of drafting paper over all the other circuit drawings and start drawing the new one.
From time to time this guy would get calls from the NASA teams that were actually building the rockets. They’d say they were calling about a specific circuit, so this guy would start flipping through the corners of all the sheets of drafting paper looking for the right one. When he found the right one he’d duck his head under so he could get a good look at the circuit diagram while discussing it on the phone with the NASA people.
If he had to then he’d actually crawl onto the drafting table during a call. My dad says that more than once he walked into the office to find this guy covered by sheets of drafting paper with only his legs & the telephone cord visible as he talked to the NASA engineers.
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She didn't write all of the code by hand. She led and worked with a team that did it.
It's still impressive, but it wasn't a solo job.
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That comma in that text makes my brain hurt
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Not necessarily. Complex shapes yes, but simple shapes you don't really need a computer model. The main limitation on building height historically has been to do with materials from memory. It's been a while since I did structural engineering though so correct me if I'm wrong.
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I don't think more difficult is correct, just different. Take cars as an example (because I don't know anything about the engineering of large buildings): In the 1930's and 40's it would have been completely impossible to design and build a 2020's car. But the cars that they did build then were not "more difficult" to design and build.
Engineers don't work harder when they get new tools, they just make different things.-
I don't know, I think more difficult is accurate.
Look at any major building project from a hundred years ago. How many man hours would it take from concept to completion? A similar project today could probably be finished in less than a quarter of the time with half as many people. Sure, they are doing it differently, but the tools make it easier so we can make more of them faster.
Referring back to your example, today's cars were impossible to make then because making a basic car was too damn hard to begin with, once that task got easier, they could focus on making slightly more difficult ones.
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They also took into account that a certain number of the workers would die from accidents and disease (see: the Panama Canal) and they were okay with that.
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The processes in manufacturing largely remained the same. Doing things faster makes things easier not more difficult.
Look at the Eiffel tower for example, immensely complicated, wild design and largely pointless (compared to modern standards).
Or compare old wooden windmills to one of the most modern structures, large open water windmills. hundreds of meters tall, simple tubular construction.
The ability that CAD and computer power in general gave us was the ability to simplify and not use more than necessary. The ability to model strength, rigidity and whatever forces necessary, that's where the real power lies.
and i think that we can't really speak about more or less difficult. The structures and designs of the past clearly have a very high level of complexity, while most modern constructions deliberately eliminate complexity. But we can't do that without computers.
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The short story i've heard it explained was that prior to the 1960's when logarithm tables were the only option, if what you were calculating was not in the table, you rounded the measurements up so that the material or whatever was stronger, and you knew it would really hold the weight to be certain. Depending on how much rounding up happened during the design, this created lots of redundancy and strength, but was more expensive since you generally had to use more materials. With CAD, you could more easily model and calculate all the loads and optimize the design and material costs for the expected lifetime of the product, building, or whatever. This saved money and was preferred by bean counters, and resulted in designs lasting just enough, rather than older designs which sometimes seemed indestructible.
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I dunno. I worked at an IT shop that specialized in supporting architecture firms. They had to contend with end-of-life printer drivers on multi-thousand dollar blueprint printers, 3d rendering software conflicts, and license hell for CAD software.
A pencil and a protractor can't crash and destroy all the work you've done this week. Just sayin'. The math hasn't changed. The tools got better and worse, however.
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Devil in the White City, the novel explores the development of the skyscraper among other events of the time. There was a David Bowie narrated version on youtube a few years back also iirc.
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It's definitely difficult, you have to calculate everything yourself. Computer made it easier but that doesn't mean it's easy too. Empire State Building is build way before modern computer after all.
I'd say steel is the crucial thing that change building and designing tall building.
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It was a lot more difficult to do almost anything.
32 comments