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For Love and Money
How Did They Do That?
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Brains Behind the Best
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Some of the most impressive buildings still standing have been built to the glory of God. In Europe, Italy's Milan Cathedral, begun in 1387, is Italy's largest example of Gothic architecture, built to accommodate 40,000 worshippers. Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, France, designed by Maurice de Sully and built between 1163-1250, is considered to be the first cathedral built on a monumental scale, and Christopher Wren's St Paul's Cathedral, built between 1675-1710, is the largest Protestant church in England.
Inspiring though these buildings are, load-bearing limitations meant that the construction of tall buildings remained constrained. Without buttressing the walls to an impractical and uneconomic extent, the extra weight of building higher would eventually cause the lower sections to be crushed and collapse.
Concrete (made from cement, stone, sand and water) may seem a modern material, but its earliest discovered use was in a Balkan Stone Age floor, thought to date from 5600 BC. Concrete was used by the Romans and Egyptians. The development of reinforced concrete was first used for building in 1854.
One of the most important technical advances was the development of load-bearing iron and steel girders. In the 1850s, Joseph Paxton designed Crystal Palace based on a revolutionary modular construction system using prefabricated iron sections. It was truly huge, with a floor area of 770,000 square feet (71,500 square metres), measuring 1,851 feet (564m) long and 450 feet (137m) wide.
Prefabricated iron girders – strong enough to hold great weights, yet light enough to lift – were later pressed into service by William Le Baron Jenney in his 1883 Chicago Home Insurance Building, generally considered to be the world's first skyscraper. Although this was demolished in 1931, before its demise it had given birth to what has become known as the 'Chicago School' of architecture characterised by elevators and metal-framed structures.
Their high-rise gauntlet was soon taken up in New York with Cass Gilbert's Woolworth Building in 1910. Numerous beautiful monsters followed, from the Chrysler and Empire State Buildings to the Sears Tower and London's Canary Wharf.
From the beginning, development of buildings, towns and cities meant an increasing number of roads were needed to connect the various centres. From meandering paths, the Roman Empire (500 BC, approximately) imposed a more cohesive system and inter-town highways became notoriously straight to shorten travelling time.
Scottish engineer John Loudon McAdam (1756-1865) invented the process of making the tarmac that now covers huge areas of the world in road surfaces. It is made from compressed stones broken into tiny pieces and usually held together with asphalt or tar.
Bridges were also needed to cross ravines and rivers, developing from stone construction under the Romans to the impressive use of steel, such as in New York's Brooklyn Bridge, built in 1883.
With increased agriculture, dams were built initially to form lakes for irrigation but later, with rising demands for power for urban areas, served as sources of electricity and water supplies. A classic example is the Hoover Dam, the largest concrete dam in the world. The 726 foot high arch gravity structure, built in 1931, harnesses the mighty Colorado River for power.