It may have helped to have a name that sounds like a 1st-century irrigation system, but Roma Agrawal seems destined to have been a structural engineer from the cradle. Born into a science-minded Indian family in New York — her mother a computer programmer, her father an electrical engineer — as a toddler she stacked miniature building blocks using miniature cranes, to imitate what she had seen in Manhattan.
Later she was sent to a famously academic British girls’ school. “I quickly sought out kindred spirits — girls who found Faraday’s law as fascinating as I did, and who experimented in the lab just for fun,” she says. Inevitably an Oxford physics degree and postgraduate work at Imperial College London followed.
At 23 she was engineering her first bridge, spanning a motorway to connect two parts of Northumbria University. Despite being a young woman in a profession dominated by blokes (she keeps a tally of the male-female ratio on the jobs she does: “11 men and me, 17 men and me . . . ) she rose quickly. Just five years later she was part of the team entrusted with the fiendish structural calculations that keep Europe’s tallest building, the Shard, towering above my head (I hope) as I write this review.
Now all of 34, she has distilled her gathered wisdom into this book. “Engineering is a big part of what makes us human,” she writes. And she makes a valiant, cogent and in many ways compelling attempt to explain the why and how of that statement. Like the book’s title, each chapter has a crisp heading — Force, Earth, Sky, Fire, Clean and so on. They give you some clue about the aspect of engineering that follows, but not the historical or technological scope of what Agrawal covers, which is impressive.
She has a knack for distilling the essence of her complex craft — stresses and struts, exoskeletons and dampers, compression and friction — into language and metaphors that lay people can understand, and doing it with childlike enthusiasm. She is clearly in love with engineering in all its manifestations. “I have been known to stroke concrete,” she writes.
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And she ranges far, geographically and historically, for her illustrative anecdotes. We learn that Mexico City is built on water, and about the ingenious engineering remedies being concocted to stop its massive cathedral from sinking, sideways, into the slime. We are taken step by step through Brunelleschi’s brilliant method for constructing the Duomo in Florence, Elisha Otis’s patent for the first modern elevators in the 1850s, and Emily Warren Roebling’s indomitable struggle to mastermind the completion of the Brooklyn Bridge, when her husband, the chief engineer, had fallen victim to the bends that afflicted so many workers digging the bridge’s foundations.
Even when the history she relates is familiar — the Great Stink of 1858, for example, which led to the belated construction of a proper sewerage system in London — she links it skilfully with present-day developments. She rejoices at how Bazalgette’s revolutionary Victorian sewers, designed for a maximum of four million people, are now being massively extended by the Tideway Tunnel project (a super-sewer deep under the Thames, scheduled to be completed in 2022) to cope with the odious waste produced by a population twice that size.
So far, so readable — but the book could have been more probing and provocative if Agrawal had taken a less reverential, “isn’t progress wonderful?” view of her profession. “As engineers, we can’t afford to make mistakes,” she tells us blandly. Yet she knows that terrible mistakes are made. She is too honest not to write about some of them, but the ones she examines — the 1907 Quebec Bridge disaster, for instance, or (much nearer home) the 1968 collapse of the 21-storey residential block on the Ronan Point estate in east London — are all reassuringly distant from today, and that’s a weakness.
I find it inexplicable, for instance, that in a chapter about the “resonance” that causes bridges and buildings to shake, she makes no mention of the infamous vibrating problems afflicting the Millennium Bridge in London when first erected in 2000, and of the two-year closure that followed while the embarrassed engineers (the great company of Arup, no less) dealt with them. If you are going to get readers gripped by synchronous lateral excitation, there’s surely no better case study than the Wobbly Bridge.
And I find it weird, bordering on negligent, that in a book published eight months after the Grenfell Tower catastrophe there is no mention of what was probably the worst engineering disaster in Britain in our lifetimes. Especially as Agrawal devotes no fewer than 15 pages to the subject of fires in tall buildings, and “the lessons” that engineers have “learnt from history”. I’m sure they apply those lessons when designing super-sleek glass towers such as the Shard. But not, it seems, when retro-fitting grim 1970s council blocks.
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Even at 34, Agrawal presumably now has experience of the abrasive clashes that frequently occur between architects and engineers, or developers and planners, and of how the ideal engineering solution is often compromised by cost considerations. Some flavour of that would have added spice to her book, but she writes not a word about any of it, except to say that her discussions with architects are “sometimes quite spirited”.
Still, as one of the brains behind the Shard, she does express one interesting qualm. With the technology available now to people building skyscrapers, she asserts, there is “no reason why we can’t go as high as we want”. Then, however, she is brave enough to ask the question that always seems to be sidestepped by city planners and “starchitects” foisting their half-mile-high towers on us: how high do we actually want to go?
Fear of fire and terrorism; the sheer hassle of getting to the 40th floor when thousands of people are using too few working lifts; the feeling of isolation and loneliness if you are forced to live so high: all this is fast eroding the glamour that high-rise towers once had. “Ultimately, our humanity will hold us back from the mega-tall,” Agrawal predicts, wishfully. Maybe. Either way, it’s refreshing to find anyone involved in high-rise construction using the word “humanity” at all.
Built: The Hidden Stories Behind Structures by Roma Agrawal, Bloomsbury, 300pp, £20
