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Summary: why they stand
Review: an excellent laymen's book on the foundations of buildings and bridges
Rating: 
Summary: Helped Resolve A Layman's Curiosity
Review: If you have ever looked up at one of our civilization's huge structures and wondered how it got there and why it still stands, this book is for you.
I'd been curious about this for many, many years but never got around to reading anything much about it. My work in Human Resources has virtually nothing to do with this area anyway.
Then, after 9/11, I really wanted to know more. The Empire State Building withstood a plane crash; why had the towers fallen?
Prof. Salvadori's book will satisfy your curiousity, and will do so in clear, understandable language.
One other thing it did for me: he expresses unreserved admiration for aesthetic as well as engineering accomplishments of the "modern" era of architecture. I revisited the work of Eero Saarinen and other great modernist arcitects as a result, and it produced great satisfaction. You'll never visit the terminal at Dulles and have it be quite the same again!
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Summary: Parts you slog through, parts you gobble
Review: Salvadori clearly explains, with the invaluable aid of lots of little pictures, how and why buildings stand up. There are chapters on cathedrals, the Eiffel Tower, the Hagia Sophia, bridges, domes, and so forth. The chapter on wind is particularly fascinating--I found out a lot of things I'd had no idea of. Other chapters, like "Form-Resistant Structures," were pretty deadly dull. Overall, though, the book was well worth reading. It's not always entertaining, but it's always informative, and sometimes tremendously interesting.
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Summary: I loved it.
Review: The author's love for the art, science, and engineering of building shines through on every page. If you haven't already you, will soon become fascinated by all that is involved in architeture in this wonderfully written book.
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Summary: Why do buildings keep standing up?
Review: This book was recommended to me by my architecture professor and it is well worth reading. Without going into too much physics the author explains clearly the importance of forces like wind on structures like bridges, skyscrapers, domes etc. To illustrate these infuences there are chapters on some of the architectural wonders of the world: Eiffel Tower, Pyramids, Brooklyn Bridge and Aya Sofia to name but a few. There are no photographs in this book but crudely drawn pictures, which actually makes the reader understand the concepts better. If you like buildings and architecture in general this book is instrumental in the understandings of why buildings stand up.
Rating:
Summary: clear and understandable
Review: This is a book that sums-up alot of material about loads, properties of building materials, beams and columns, and translates it into the strength of modern structures. I found the book fascinating and it answered many questions, among them why the height vs base of the pyramids automatically contain the value of PI. This book discussed the anchoring of todays skyscrapers and large structures. This is a book that explains where the forces and loads are projected and how they are contained and countered without getting into the mathematical aspect of it. This author did an excellent job in conveying
the logic behind structural engineering. Well done.
Rating:
Summary: clear and understandable
Review: This is a book that sums-up alot of material about loads, properties of building materials, beams and columns, and translates it into the strength of modern structures. I found the book fascinating and it answered many questions, among them why the height vs base of the pyramids automatically contain the value of PI. This book discussed the anchoring of todays skyscrapers and large structures. This is a book that explains where the forces and loads are projected and how they are contained and countered without getting into the mathematical aspect of it. This author did an excellent job in conveying
the logic behind structural engineering. Well done.
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