Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down (Da Capo Paperback)

by J.E. Gordon

When you climb the tower of a cathedral it becomes shorter, as a result of your added weight, by a very, very tiny amount, but it really does become shorter.

This quality of being able to store strain energy and deflect elastically under a load without breaking is called ‘resilience’, and it is a very valuable characteristic in a structure. Resilience may be defined as ‘the amount of strain energy which can be stored in a structure without causing permanent damage to it’.

I believe that very few artefacts are intrinsically ugly or beautiful simply because of their function

Although it is very widely and commonly believed – indeed taken as axiomatic – that ugliness came in with industrialism as an inescapable consequence of mass-production, I doubt if this view would really stand up to proper historical examination. I think it is more reasonable to suppose that elegance and business enterprise declined more or less hand in hand and as a result of something rather nasty and complacent which emerged from the British character during the Age of Reform.

The modern man asks ‘What is this man or this thing for?’ rather than ‘What is this man or this thing?’ Herein, no doubt, lie the causes of many of our modern sicknesses.