ABSTRACT
Modern structural engineering is presented to its students as a system, complete
in all its parts, applicable anywhere, for all conditions. Quite how we’ve become
entranced by such faith has already been touched upon. Later chapters will review
whether anything like its realisation has been achieved. However close we have
now come to a universal method, it is one still heavily marked by the extended
process of reaching it, a process based on an accretion of ideas, assembled
around contingencies, situations demanding immediate and pragmatic solutions,
so-called ‘quick fixes’. And yet despite this piecemeal approach, the essential shape
of structural engineering was definitively moulded in a very short space of time,
by a few individuals, all working in the vast sea-change of consciousness labelled
the later Renaissance.1 Various histories have it that a modern engineering conscious-
ness sprang up almost fully formed overnight to be rapidly accepted by the
establishment, and indeed the predominance of an ‘Italian model’ merits explanation.
Perhaps a new approach to structure was a delayed inevitability, over-determined
