David Blockley
Teoksen Bridges: The science and art of the world's most inspiring structures tekijä
Tietoja tekijästä
Tekijän teokset
Merkitty avainsanalla
Yleistieto
- Syntymäaika
- 1941
- Sukupuoli
- male
- Kansalaisuus
- United Kingdom
- Ammatit
- civil engineer
professor - Organisaatiot
- University of Bristol
Jäseniä
Kirja-arvosteluja
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Tilastot
- Teokset
- 7
- Jäseniä
- 203
- Suosituimmuussija
- #108,639
- Arvio (tähdet)
- 3.0
- Kirja-arvosteluja
- 3
- ISBN:t
- 18
- Kielet
- 1
We can probably blame the publishers for the rather minimal quota of illustrations (bridges are a gloriously visual topic, it's really a shame that we get so few pictures of those mentioned in the text) and for the ridiculous decision to ban any maths beyond basic arithmetic. Surely, almost everybody likely to pick up a book like this will have done some high-school maths and physics and be familiar at least with trig functions and simple calculus, both of which would have made the book a lot easier to understand.
However, what is clearly the author's fault is that the book tries to do too many different things at the same time, and ends up not quite doing any of them in a completely satisfying way. As a counterpart to the language metaphors he consistently uses to support his explanation of the different elements used in bridges and the way they work (or fail to work) structurally, Blockley tries to get us into a postmodern discussion of the connections between physical and metaphorical bridges (on occasion, even metaphysical ones). But he doesn't really have enough space - or enough examples - to build this into anything worthwhile, and it just ends up as rather pointless froth at the beginning and end of his chapters.
More substantively, Blockley also wants to spend some time on what seems to be his own main research interest, the way "joined-up thinking" about the process as a whole is crucial to the success and safety of big engineering projects. This makes interesting reading as far as the details of the case-studies he presents go, but when it starts to get more theoretical it feels very much like a watered-down version of a lecture from a generic management course, little of which is specific to bridges or even to engineering.… (lisätietoja)