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Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771

ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM

Monday, September 19, 2016 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium

Henry Petroski

"Infrastructure: the Road Taken"

ABSTRACT -- This talk will look at the history and current state of of infrastructure in the United States through the lens of roads and bridges. We tend to take for granted the designs of our traffic signals, road signs, white and yellow lines, and other features of our infrastructure. Many of these features, however, were different in the past. This talk will show how difficult it can be to reach agreement even on such seemingly simple decisions as whether the whether the centerline on highways should be yellow or white.

The talk will also give case studies of how bridges and large public works are designed, funded, approved and built. These case studies will show that the process of building infrastructure is complicated, but not incomprehensible.

SPEAKER -- Henry Petroski is the Aleksandar S. Vesic Professor of Civil Engineering and a professor of history at Duke University. He is the author of a number of books on design and failure, including To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design and To Forgive Design: Understanding Failure. He also writes the Engineering column in American Scientist magazine. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society.


Engineering Colloquium home page: https://ecolloq.gsfc.nasa.gov