The Role of the Structural Engineer
What is the role of the structural engineer? One way to answer this question is to say that the structural engineer is the one who makes the dream into reality.
There is no limit to the imagination of man. When we look at our world of only a couple of hundred years ago, we can see this imagination at work. People could envision flying ships that could carry people and goods through the sky. They could imagine great bodies of water being subdued by mighty bridges. They could see buildings that reached like the legendary Tower of Babel into the very heavens. And all of these things came to be, but someone had to take the dreams and make them practical. This is the role of the Structural Engineer.
The role of the Structural Engineer was to make it happen in a way that would be workable. They had to learn of the properties of matter and the sources of energy. They had to understand stress and how to overcome or compensate for it. They had to understand what could not be done and why, and then find another way to do it anyway.
Structural Engineers often talk of resisting load and dissipating energy. These two principles are central to structural engineering, but they are not simple concepts at all. Load can take so many forms. It can be the weight of a material itself, or its rigidity. Energy can be everything from temperature to wind to radiation and back again. It takes a complete understanding of science and of mathematics in order to make things stand.
This is the role of the Structural Engineer in the simplest terms. He makes things stand and work. It goes deeper than just existence. A person might make a chair, for example, and it could be used to sit on it. The structural engineer can apply his knowledge to make it comfortable. Anyone can throw a temporary bridge across a stream and scurry across it. The structural engineer can apply his knowledge and make a bridge that will withstand flood and weather and stand for centuries.
The dictionary definition of engineering speaks of making things “useful to people.” This is the true role of the Structural Engineer. If something will not last; if something is not safe; if something is not practical; or if something can not be done, that something is not useful to people. The Structural Engineer is the one who makes what we can dream or conceive into something we can actually use.