Philip Nobel

Philip Nobel’s Sixteen Acres, about the redevelopment of the World Trade Center site, was published by Granta in 2005.

Oops: What makes things break

Philip Nobel, 21 February 2013

Whenever you step on a bridge, every bit of your weight is being transferred – part to one shore, part to the other – down to the bedrock below. If the structure is to continue standing when it takes on a new load, every link in the system has to resist the burden, kilo for kilo. Your weight, technically a ‘live load’ (which is to say transient, as opposed to the...

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