The Checklist Manifesto_ How to Get Things Right - Atul Gawande [22]
But Salvia was good at solving complex problems—he tried to explain how he solves quadratic equations in his head, though all I managed to pick up was that I’d never before heard someone say “quadratic equation” in a Boston accent. “I also liked the concept of creating,” he said. As a result, he switched to engineering, a scientific but practical field, and he loved it. He learned, as he put it, “basic statics and dynamics—you know, F equals ma,” and he learned about the chemistry and physics of steel, concretes, and soil.
But he’d built nothing when he graduated with his bachelor’s degree and joined Sumner Shane, an architectural engineering firm that specialized in structural engineering for shopping centers. One of its projects was a new shopping mall in Texas, and Salvia was assigned the roof system. He found he actually understood a lot about how to build a solid roof from his textbooks and from the requirements detailed in building codes.
“I knew from college how to design with structural steel—how to use beams and columns,” he said. And the local building codes spelled out what was required for steel strength, soil composition, snow-bearing capacity, wind-pressure resistance, and earthquake tolerance. All he had to do was factor these elements into the business deal, which specified the size of the building, the number of floors, the store locations, the loading docks. As we talked he was already drawing the contours for me on a piece of paper. It started out as a simple rectangle. Then he sketched in the store walls, doorways, walking space. The design began taking form.
“You draw a grid of likely locations to carry the roof weight,” he said, and he put in little crosses where columns could be placed. “The rest is algebra,” he said. “You solve for X.” You calculate the weight of the roof from its size and thickness, and then, given columns placed every thirty feet, say, you calculate the diameter and strength of the column required. You check your math to make sure you’ve met all the requirements.
All this he had learned in college. But, he discovered, there was more—much more—that they hadn’t taught him in school.
“You know the geometric theory of what is best, but not the practical theory of what can be done,” he said. There was the matter of cost, for example, about which he had not a clue. The size and type of materials he put in changed the cost of the project, it turned out. There was also the matter of aesthetics, the desires of a client who didn’t want a column standing in the middle of a floor, for instance, or blocking a particular sightline.
“If engineers were in charge, every building would be a rectangular box,” Salvia said. Instead, every building is new and individual in ways both small and large—they are complex—and as a result there is often no textbook formula for the problems that come up. Later, for example, when he established his own firm, he and his team did the structural engineering for Boston’s International Place, a landmark forty-six-story steel and glass tower designed by the architect Philip Johnson. The building was unusual, a cylinder smashed against a rectangle, a form that hadn’t been tried in a skyscraper before. From a structural engineering point of view, Salvia explained, cylinders are problematic. A square provides 60 percent more stiffness than a circle, and in wind or an earthquake a building needs to be able to resist the tendency to twist or bend. But a distorted cylinder it was, and he and his team had to invent the engineering to realize Johnson’s aesthetic vision.
Salvia’s first mall roof may have been a simpler proposition, but it seemed to him at the time to have no end of difficulties. Besides the concerns of costs and aesthetics, he also needed to deal with the requirements of all the other professionals involved. There were the plumbing engineers, the electrical engineers, the mechanical engineers—every one of them wanting to put pipes, wiring, HVAC units just where his support columns were supposed to go.
“A building is like