Walls, arches and dams — or cloud-capp’d towers and the stability of masonry

Abstract

As we have seen, unless one is as clever as Nature is, the whole business of making tension structures is set about with difficulties, complications and treacherous traps for the unwary. This is especially the case when we want to make a structure from more than one piece of material, so that we are faced with the problem of preventing it from coming apart at the joints. For these reasons our ancestors generally avoided tension structures as far as they could and tried to use constructions in which everything was in compression.

What are you able to build with your blocks? Castles and palaces, temples and docks. R. L. Stevenson, A Child’s Garden of Verses