Janine Benyus Quotes

Our fresh technical resources have furthered the disintegration of solid masses of masonry into slender piers, with consequent far-reaching economies in bulk, space, weight, and haulage.

In my opinion, as an engineer, a bridge is the most difficult thing you can do. You are not working in the direction of gravity but against it - so the problem opposes the solution.

I wanted to make the lightest shoe possible, but still be able to perform at the same time.

You can take weight out of a car and truck and still make it very strong.

Lay a beam between these two towers of such width as we need to walk on: there is no philosophical wisdom of such great firmness that it can give us courage to walk on it as we should if it were on the ground.

Architecture ... the adaptation of form to resist force.

I emphasize that virtually every engineering calculation is ultimately a failure calculation, because without a failure criterion against which to measure the calculated result, it is a meaningless number.

Emphasis was usually put on the horizontal acceleration factor, for the simple reason that ordinary structures have a built-in safety factor for the vertical component; that is, gravity.

A career for me is something like building a bridge. You know, where to put the lifts. You have a plan. I have a blueprint for each film, but not for my life.

If you look at any leaf on any tree branch, it's similar to but not exactly a repetition of the previous branch. So the new science of complexity or showing how an architecture can be produced just as quickly, cheaply and efficiently by using computer production methods to get the slight variation, the self-similarity.

Building is just skilled labor, I suppose. It's a lot of work. I don't mind other people building them, but the way things go together and are made is interesting to me; I like that a lot.

When I was a little girl, I wanted to be a civil engineer. No joke. I would come home from school and build bridges out of toothpicks and see how much weight they would hold before falling.

Bent metal is worse than bent wood and weight for weight is more flexible.

Form and function are a unity, two sides of one coin. In order to enhance function, appropriate form must exist or be created.

We forget the importance of engineering, but it's been used to design everything from St. Paul's Cathedral to The Shard.

I object to the hegemony of form in contemporary architecture. We have very advanced technological tools, but ultimately, we create buildings exactly like we used to before: We send the drawings to an engineer and let him struggle with figuring out how to build it.

When I was in architecture school, I became curious about the exact mathematics, physics, and construction of the great structures I had been studying. I wanted to know how these amazing things would work: the Pantheon, the dome of Michelangelo, the dome of Brunelleschi. So I decided to study civil engineering.

It's fascinating to me how they build bridges or tunnels.

Nature is a brilliant engineer and builder. It knows how to create seashells that are twice as strong as the most resistant ceramics human beings can manufacture, and it produces silk fibers five times stronger than steel. Nature also knows how to create multipurpose forms.

There's a lot of knowledge in civil engineering about how soils will react when subjected to heavy loads. When you take lightweight vehicles and granular soils of varying composition, it's a very complex modeling process.

No one wants to walk across a crowd-sourced bridge.

In nature, there is no separation between design, engineering, and fabrication; the bone does it all.

If black boxes survive air crashes - why don't they make the whole plane out of that stuff?

I am not interested in constructing a building, so much as in having a perspicuous view of the foundations of possible buildings.

It has always seemed to me that the most difficult part of building a bridge would be the start.