Ingenuity - Engineering Ground Breakers

The Burj Dubai holds the title as the tallest man-made structure ever built. Pushing the technological envelope, it is the benchmark all future record-breaking skyscrapers will be based upon. Near India’s capital Delhi, the Qutub Minar reigns supreme for almost a thousand years as the world’s tallest brick minaret. Trace the history of two towers, two eras, both governed by the same principles of Islamic architecture.

On a fully urbanised island the size of Singapore, water scarcity is a dire issue. The solution is the construction of an urban reservoir, the first of its kind in the world. Together with cutting edge technology, Singapore is on its way to water sufficiency, just like how the city of Constantinople had the foresight to build massive underground cisterns in the 6th century to become one of the greatest cities in the ancient world.

Tankers are the workhorses of our modern economy and the largest of these are built in Korea. Features like double-hulls and multiple tanks have pushed the cargo and safety capacity of tankers to new heights, making them the mainstay of the oil industry. It’s also the same principle that centuries-old Phinisi ships remain the transport backbone of the Indonesian archipelago. Two different ships, one success story.

For years, the roads of Mumbai were a hotbed of congestion and overcrowding. Now, a dynamic link road promises to ease the city’s traffic woes. But the construction of Mumbai’s first double-tiered flyover has been anything but easy, with resettlement and land acquisition proving a logistic nightmare. Yet a thousand years ago, the Khmer rulers of Cambodia moved a nation with a complex network of roads and rivers that linked their empire across four countries.

The largest airport terminal in the world in Beijing is an engineering marvel that nonetheless pays strict adherence to the principles of Chinese fengshui, and marks a new footnote in an age-old tradition of building big. To understand how far that tradition has progressed, we explore the Todai-ji temple in Nara, designed and built by a Chinese monk, which today remains the world’s largest wooden building.

It is the world’s deepest immersed tunnel. Spanning across Asia and Europe, the Marmaray Project promises to ease Istanbul’s decades-old traffic woes. Located in an earthquake zone, it is an engineer feat that is only rivalled by the discovery of a nearby ancient port that hinted at how the early Greeks made the maritime traverse between the two continents several thousand years ago.

Self declared 8th Wonder of the World, the Palm trilogy are the largest man-made islands in the world and a credible testimony of human mastery over nature. Employing technology like satellite positioning, it has broken new records and engineering milestones, recalling the heydays of the Harrapan civilisation in Dholavira, a city built to be an oasis on the salt flats of Gujarat in India over two millennia ago

The Three Gorges Dam is the largest hydro-electric dam in the world. That it is a sheer engineering marvel cannot be denied. Yet questions abound over environmental and social issues, not to mention logistics problems of moving ships up and down river. An ingenious system of shiplocks has gone towards solving that problem, echoing the techniques of Banaue farmers in the Philippines who mastered the art of managing water over two thousand years ago