Disasters by Design cover art

Disasters by Design

How Engineering Failures Shaped the Modern World

Audible Premium Plus 30-day free trial

Pre-order free with Premium Plus
1 credit a month to buy any audiobook in our entire collection.
Unlimited access to our all-you-can-listen catalogue of 15K+ audiobooks and podcasts.
Member-only deals & discounts.
Auto-renews at $16.45/mo after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Disasters by Design

By: Grady Hillhouse
Pre-order free with Premium Plus

Auto-renews at $16.45/mo after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Pre-order for $20.13

Pre-order for $20.13

Season's Savings | $0.99/mo for 3 months

Auto-renews at $8.99/mo. after 3 months - terms apply.

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 learned 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.

© Grady Hillhouse 2027 (P) Penguin Audio 2027

 Disaster Relief Engineering Social Sciences
adbl_web_anon_alc_button_suppression_t1

Critic Reviews

Grady opens a door through the seemingly mundane to reveal a universe of hidden structures and human ingenuity all around us. Disasters by Design is infrastructure appreciation, a history lesson, and engineering magic all in one (Adam Savage)
A sober reminder, written with warmth and heart, that engineering is vital to the safe functioning of our communities, and that engineers hold responsibility. If you live in, work in, or use structures and infrastructure, this book is for you (Roma Agrawal)
A gripping exploration of how catastrophe shapes the world we build. Grady Hillhouse turns engineering failures into compelling human stories and shows how understanding what went wrong helps us build better (Fred Mills)
Every structure has a record of decisions that made it—some great, some disastrous. Hillhouse shows how those decisions echo across history, sharing fascinating tales about how the things that fell apart taught us to build the world still standing. It's awesome (Brent Underwood)
An unexpectedly inspiring masterpiece. It’s Aesop’s Fables, if Aesop was a civil engineer. The moral of every story is that despite humanity’s maddening proclivity to have to learn lessons the hard way, we do ultimately learn them. A tribute to failure, even the most catastrophic failure, as a road to do better (Latif Nasser)
Wonderful. I’ve read a lot of popular science and almost everything in this book was totally new to me. Somehow a sequence of disasters convinced me I should've spent my life as an engineer (Zach Weinersmith)
No reviews yet
In the spirit of reconciliation, Audible acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.