Destruction: The Path to Construction

At first, when I began reading the article 'Five Machines that Changed the World' I thought: How did this machine change the world and how does it relate civil engineering? However, by the end of the reading I noticed that the engines exposed really shifted the way people built in the past. Structures in the middle age had to be done contemplating the possibility of an attack, this means that they had to think of the best way to carry out the construction of a 30 m thick wall!

This is really astonishing because we would never think that the beginning of structural engineering could be found when thinking about war protection, and battles. After reading the article I can definitely say that there's a relationship between structure building and conflict. Nowadays when building a structure engineers think of its resistance to earthquakes, hurricanes and stuff like that, they are not concerned about huge rocks and bodies flying across the sky that can hit the structure; but during the middle age the main concern of architects was not nature, theirs were the flying rocks, because they had to make sure that their castle could not get destroyed. Then conflict changed the way building is done because it introduced the concept of resistance. Modern buildings must be resistant without having a 30 m thick wall. Thus civil engineering could have never been what it is today without war, the concept of building resistance would be different and infrastructure would not be one thinking about possible destruction.