Every structure tells a story

Renzo Piano,  the architect of the Shard, Western Europe’s tallest building, the engineering feats are revealed by the inspirational female engineer Roma Agrawal, who looks at how construction has evolved from the mud huts of our ancestors to skyscrapers of steel that reach several hundreds of meters into the sky. She reveals how engineers have tunnelled through kilometers of solid mountains, how they’ve bridged across the widest and deepest of rivers and tamed nature’s water resources. She also tells about the visionaries who created the ground-breaking materials in the Pantheon’s record holding concrete dome and the frame of the record-breaking Eiffel Tower.  She examines the tragedies like the collapse of the Quebec Bridge and looks at the secret lives of structures. She vividly explains the incredible engineering feats.

 Roma Agrawal, a 33-year-old structural engineer, grew up in Ohio, New York and Mumbai,  who builds BIG bridges, skyscrapers and sculptures, whose first project at twenty-two constructed a bridge over a six-lane highway in Newcastle and worked in The Shard, designing the building’s peak and foundations.

Can you ever imagine a world  where everything that engineers had created disappeared with no cars, no houses, no phones, tunnels, underpasses,  bridges or roads

Built: The Hidden Stories behind Our Structures by Roma Agrawal, Bloomsbury £20, 320 pages.