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Summary: structure problems
Review: a good book explaining the details og building and bridge failures. im wondering why the author didnt include the word 'bridge' in the title since this book covers a lot of them. illustrations are very helpful as well
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Summary: anatomy of a disaster
Review: A very interesting book on architecture which focuses on things that don't get talked about all that often - structural failures of buildings - is "Why Buildings Fall Down" by Matthys Levy and Mario Salvadori. If you can get past a bit of well-illustrated mechanical engineering technical details, it's a terrific tale of how a cascade of seemingly minor mistakes in design, workmanship, engineering and materials can take a perfectly reasonable concept and produce a disaster.This book was recommended to me by a network engineer who said it helped him think about how computer networks fail under stress.
Rating:
Summary: anatomy of a disaster
Review: A very interesting book on architecture which focuses on things that don't get talked about all that often - structural failures of buildings - is "Why Buildings Fall Down" by Matthys Levy and Mario Salvadori. If you can get past a bit of well-illustrated mechanical engineering technical details, it's a terrific tale of how a cascade of seemingly minor mistakes in design, workmanship, engineering and materials can take a perfectly reasonable concept and produce a disaster. This book was recommended to me by a network engineer who said it helped him think about how computer networks fail under stress.
Rating: 
Summary: Fascinating case studies
Review: An entertaining book for readers who know about structures, and an educational book for lay readers, WHY BUILDINGS FALL DOWN is an interesting collection of case studies concerning building failures. Never condescending, but never too technical, it's a fun way to learn about architecture or structural engineering.
Rating: 
Summary: A Good Book, but Outdated
Review: I'm hopeful that the authors will produce a new edition of this book, with the forensic explanations of the collapse of the World Trade Center towers explained in detail.
It is, nonetheless, a worthy sequel to Prof. Salvadori's great work, "Why Buildings Stand Up." It's best to buy both and read them in sequence.
It's also fun to cross the New River Gorge Bridge in West Virginia (as my son and I did last summer) and think about Galloping Gertie...
:)
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Summary: Fun follow-up
Review: If you have read the book 'Why Buildings stand up' you should definitely read this one, since it is much more interesting to know why certain buildings collapse, since this makes the news. There are some chapters almost the same as the first book, but most chapters are case studies on bridges (the famous galloping Gertie in Washington State), explosions, structural failures etc. An extra chapter is added to explain the collapse of the the World Trade Center Towers after the September 11 Attacks in 2001. Also 5 Appendixes are added dealing with stress, loads and more engineering things, which can also be found on the PBS site on buildings.
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Summary: Very entertaining, sometimes a bit sad...
Review: Some of the great catatrophes in architecture explained in an informative and entertaining manner. From the pyramids to mondern skyscrapers, this book travels far in its scope.
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Summary: Even non-enginners will love this one
Review: Some of the great catatrophes in architecture explained in an informative and entertaining manner. From the pyramids to mondern skyscrapers, this book travels far in its scope.
Rating:
Summary: A clear and entertaining book
Review: Such is our morbid fascination that this book is inevitably more attractive than one called "Why Buildings Stay Up". That said, I think I have not only learned more about structural engineering than I would have done from a positive counterpart, but I have also learned vastly more about the other factors, human and natural, that influence the ultimate success or failure of structures. The book is based on the same material as the late 1990s TV series of the same name, and having watched that series many of the incidents and issues were familiar to me. The advantage of the book is the ability to digest information at your own speed and refer back to earlier pages, but it has to be said that the TV series communicated some of the issues better, helped by animated graphics and by the better mutual support of both pictures and narrative. Each chapter takes a topic, whether a human factor like the law, a type of construction such as the dome, or a cause of failure such as metal fatigue, and then illustrates the issues by consideration of a number of case studies, frequently including some notable successes as well as dramatic failures. In the case of failures the book always attempts to assess both the practical cause, and also any human cause, impact and implications. The book is very well written, in an accessible style supported by some useful appendixes on structural engineering principles. However, sometimes the simple line drawings and verbal descriptions of a structure don't manage to communicate a full understanding, and more sophisticated illustrations might have helped. Mario Salvadori died in 1997 (at the good age of 90), and the surviving author, Matthys Levy updated the book in 2002. My feelings on the update are mixed: the chapter on terrorism, culminating with the collapse of the New York Trade Centre towers on September 11th 2001 is excellent; but why did the author not acknowledge the brilliant success of efforts to stabilise the Leaning Tower of Pisa in the late 1990s? Overall I heartily recommend this book to anyone with a serious or lay interest in structural engineering, and the many complex human and natural issues which influence it.
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Summary: Enlightening, not-too-tech intro. to structural engineering
Review: This was a great introduction to the fundamentals of building science - understanding why things don't work is a great help in understanding why they do. Each chapter discusses one example of something that went wrong and explains another reason why structures can fail.
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