Why structures failand what would have caught it
6 well-documented structural failures with the engineering root cause and the design checks that would have flagged each one.
Buildings fall down for a small, repeatable set of reasons: punching shear at a column-slab interface, foundation settlement on unanticipated soft soil, liquefaction under seismic loading, lateral-torsional buckling of slender beams, and corrosion-driven detail failures. Reading post-mortems is the cheapest way to build engineering judgement — every collapse below mapped to a specific check the platform performs. The lesson is never “the engineers were careless”; it's almost always “a specific load path was missed, and a single check, run on time, would have caught it.”
Editorial summaries for educational reference. Sources are cited per entry. Each case is well-documented in public engineering literature.