• Question: what is the biggest building you built?

    Asked by erabsky to Amit, Emily, Joanne, Martin, Paige on 14 Mar 2012.
    • Photo: Amit Pujari

      Amit Pujari answered on 12 Mar 2012:


      Civil engineers and construction workers build the buildings..
      Tallest buildings like skyscrapers, huge buildings like airports and not so big but important buildings like hospitals, all are built by civil engineers. All buildings are usually designed by architects.

      Engineering is a huge area. For example, as I said, civil engineers will build the buildings. Electrical engineers would take care about how to provide electricity/power to the building. Mechanical engineer would create machines which are needed to build the buildings. Communication engineer would know how to provide telephone, internet, TV etc. service to the building.

      I am a biomedical engineer, so I work with medical devices.
      Devices to help cure disease, devices to help people walk. So my area of work is different than building or construction.

    • Photo: Emily Bullen

      Emily Bullen answered on 12 Mar 2012:


      I haven’t built any buildings, I would only design chemical plants. In the pharmaceutical world they are not very big, as compared to other industries we don’t make very large quantities. So a pharma building/plant would be maybe 6 stories tall?

    • Photo: Joanne Davies

      Joanne Davies answered on 12 Mar 2012:


      Great question erabsky and I’m very pleased to meet you!

      I’ve never built a building. I work on products and medical devices.

      To make buildings, you need to be a Civil Engineer. My grandfather was a Civil Engineer and he built loads of houses and a big housing estate. The largest buildings he made are some factories on an industrial estate in Blaenavon, Wales.

    • Photo: Paige Brown

      Paige Brown answered on 13 Mar 2012:


      I’ve never actually built a building… that is the work of many civil engineers. They help to build the biggest bridges and buildings in the world!

      I work with tiny tiny things, on the nanoscale! Perhaps for me the question is what is the ‘smallest’ thing you have every built, instead of the biggest! 🙂

      The smallest thing that I have every built was close to 1 billionth of a meter, or 1 meter divided by 1 billion!

    • Photo: Martin Wallace

      Martin Wallace answered on 14 Mar 2012:


      I’m afraid I’ve never built a building either. t my university there were lots of different types of engineering departments. I studied at the Mechanical engineering department – here we studied things that moved and bent and flowed (engineering is also about how fluids interact); next door was the Electronic engineering department – all things to do with electricity and computers; on the otherside was Civil engineering – here is where people learn how to build bridges and buildings and the like; also there was a Manufacturing engineering department – where they studied about the theories behind how things are produced and made.
      There are lots of different types of engineering and they are all connected in some way – so even though I didn’t study Civil engineering, it could be possible for me to work in an industry building structures if I wanted.

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