Disasters by Design

Grady opens a door through the seemingly mundane to reveal a universe of hidden structures and human ingenuity all around us. Disasters by Design is infrastructure appreciation, a history lesson, and engineering magic all in one

Adam Savage, co-host of Mythbusters and bestselling author of Every Tool’s a Hammer

A sober reminder, written with warmth and heart, that engineering is vital to the safe functioning of our communities, and that engineers hold responsibility. If you live in, work in, or use structures and infrastructure, this book is for you

Roma Agrawal, author of Built and Nuts and Bolts

A gripping exploration of how catastrophe shapes the world we build. Grady Hillhouse turns engineering failures into compelling human stories and shows how understanding what went wrong helps us build better

Fred Mills, author of Mega Builds and creator of The B1M

Every structure has a record of decisions that made it—some great, some disastrous. Hillhouse shows how those decisions echo across history, sharing fascinating tales about how the things that fell apart taught us to build the world still standing. It's awesome

Brent Underwood, bestselling author of Ghost Town Living

An unexpectedly inspiring masterpiece. It’s Aesop’s Fables, if Aesop was a civil engineer. The moral of every story is that despite humanity’s maddening proclivity to have to learn lessons the hard way, we do ultimately learn them. A tribute to failure, even the most catastrophic failure, as a road to do better

Latif Nasser, co-host of Radiolab

Wonderful. I’ve read a lot of popular science and almost everything in this book was totally new to me. Somehow a sequence of disasters convinced me I should've spent my life as an engineer

Zach Weinersmith, bestselling coauthor of Soonish and A City on Mars

A gripping exploration of how catastrophe shapes the world we build. Grady Hillhouse turns engineering failures into compelling human stories and shows how understanding what went wrong helps us build better

Fred Mills, author of Mega Builds and creator of The B1M

A sober reminder, written with warmth and heart, that engineering is vital to the safe functioning of our communities, and that engineers hold responsibility. If you live, work, or use structures and infrastructure, this book is for you

Roma Agrawal, author of Built and Nuts and Bolts

Grady opens a door through the seemingly mundane to reveal a universe of hidden structures and human ingenuity all around us. Disasters by Design is infrastructure appreciation, a history lesson, and engineering magic all in one

Adam Savage, co-host of Mythbusters and bestselling author of Every Tool’s a Hammer