Knowing our history, our leaders, our heroes, our world's architecture is not something that needs an explanation. How is this not part of the curriculum?
History helps us use our long tradition of building structures to push new boundaries in our workplaces. We can stand on the structures of the past and learn to improve future design. We need to try to work daily towards rejecting the status quo but only after we fully understand why. History will help us.
In Henry Petroski's book Remaking the World he states:
Engineering ideas and designs are seldom of themselves. Historically, they came out of the oral traditions of the crafts, in which nonliterary thinking abounded, and out of the pictorial catalogs of devises and structures that comprised the notebooks of early engineers...the creative engineer owes a debt to earlier engineers, for it is the wealth of clever artifacts , machines, and schemes they have left for us to climb upon and use that serve as the bases of ideas for the present and future. [Petroski, 1997:47]
Eladio Dieste is shown above, born in Uruguay, created stunning structures with his revolutionary approach to building with reinforced masonry. We need to know him.