As a software "engineer", I've always been envious of architects and the well-defined path to mastery that exists in their field. You start off as a lowly apprentice and only through years of study and practice can you progress.
As a result, the best architects in the world are generally forty and above and there is a correlation between age and competence. There is no 22 year old rockstar architect. The bar of competence is so high that six months of concentrated effort is simply not sufficient for an outsider to become a professional architect.
I found it interesting wandering around the ancient sites in Egypt to see what survived 4000 years. Granite was the easy winner followed by heaped structures of softer rocks.
The article title is confusing architects with structural engineers.
The Lindy Effect in action again. People should always seriously study things that have survived a long time, instead of downplaying them due to neophilia.
Isn't part of this talent gained thru motivation, in turn judged necessary as they had "skin in the game"? https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/18558/were-roma...
I hope one day they say the same thing about us programmers of the present time.
Hello from 2018 and sorry about JavaScript!
The megaliths of Bolivia and structures all over the world which man could not replicate prove this. It would seem that the more we turn our back on the natural world and our history, the more we hold ourselves back from break throughs in many areas.
This MIT professor looks like a very intelligent guy, and I agree with what he says, but the article shows that the reporter did not understand some things.
Plasticity theory is presented as an alternative to the finite element method, but in fact they are usually used together. While plasticity theory explains how materials deform, the FE method makes possible to apply this theory to complex structures.
In any case, the problem cannot be FEM, but how it is applied and how the results are interpreted. It is very likely (even expected) that applying the requirements used for steel or concrete structures to the Pantheon will give you wrong results, but that does not mean FEM is the problem. Blindly doing simulations without having a good model and being very careful of how boundary conditions are applied and how to interpret the results, on the other hand, is becoming a greater problem as the necessary hardware becomes more affordable.