Grady Hillhouse – författare

Engineering in Plain Sight is a beautifully illustrated field guide to the infrastructure around us.Engineering in Plain Sight extends the field guide genre from natural phenomena to human-made structures, making them approachable and understandable to non-engineers. It transforms readers' perspectives of the built environment, converting the act of looking at infrastructure from a mundane inevitability into an everyday diversion and joy. Each section of this accessible, informative book features colorful illustrations revealing the fascinating details of how the human-made world works. An ideal road trip companion, this book offers a fresh perspective on the parts of the environment that often blend into the background. Readers will learn to identify characteristics of the electrical grid, roadways, railways, bridges, tunnels, waterways, and more. Engineering in Plain Sight inspires curiosity, interest, and engagement in how the infrastructure around us is designed and constructed.

When a giant bridge collapses, a gas explosion blows up a building, or a major dam bursts, it’s hard not to wonder how things could have gone so catastrophically wrong. According to Grady Hillhouse, those failures are the defining force of engineering, where the most important lessons were learned the hard way.With the same engaging and accessible approach that make his YouTube videos so popular, Hillhouse breaks complex failures down into their component parts, showing how poor judgment and willful ignorance can play just as big a role as an errant measurement or faulty component. The fascinating behind-the-scenes stories of history’s greatest structural breakdowns, from the Johnstown flood and the Tacoma Narrows bridge collapse to the Leaning Tower of Pisa, reveal how engineers learn from their mistakes and developed the core principles that keep buildings standing today.Not all of us will design a building or lay out an electrical grid, but thinking like an engineer can help us spot weak links, respect margins, and value hard truths over wishful thinking. Disasters by Design celebrates human resilience and our extraordinary capacity for progress.