Hard problems are great because once you solve them, you get to solve even more challenging things as a result. I (with a small and great group of people) build a lot of physical things that are meant to look deceptively simple through various means, mostly being the disappearance of artefact of support. This leads to a lot of great design, engineering, documentation, and procurement logistic challenges. Past: wrapping a building in custom made chain-mail and need it to a) fit like a glove, b) not fall off, and c) not cause us to go broke. Current: 18,000m2 (196k SF) of entirely custom, double curved aluminium panels. The unique part count is currently hovering around 1,000,000 distinct components that all need to end up on a piece of paper (the building industry is big, slow, and strange).
I explored this in 2002 with a group of friends while on Christmas break from school. We had to slide down the side of I-75, pry open a grate and drop down onto the top of the water mains running through. We walked almost the entire length of the system before popping out of a manhole in the middle of down town Cinci. The stations and tunnels seem to have been used as some sort of shelters during cold war as there was large amounts of "artifacts" left over from the Civil Defense era (water canisters, beds, etc.). A great experience.
In some UK cities, they build hardened telephone exchanges in the late 50s early 60s to try to guarantee communications in the event of a nuclear war. The one in Birmingham is now used for data cables and isn't open to public because of water-table rises.
The Anchor exchange construction project had a cover story: an underground for Birmingham that, alas, had to be cancelled later because of changes in the market!
The main one in London was re-purposed from an abandoned underground station, itself used as a communication centre in the 2nd world war.
There's a building in lower manhattan that was designed for that purpose as well:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/33_Thomas_Street
Technically there are two buildings built for telephone switching, but I don't think the other building (375 Pearl St) is nearly as overbuilt.
The block of flats I live in used to be a UK telephone exchange, and it has some seriously thick concrete walls and massive steel girders. I dare say this was partly to house the old electro-mechanical exchanges, but it does look like it'd survive a bomb blast.
We use GH (Grasshopper) to generate fully attributed and restrained models for FEA packages and then pipe them over real time to visualize (in the FEA pacakage) and run solvers. It allows us to create complex and very large FEA models quickly and iteratively to solve some tricky engineering problems.
There are structural solutions on top of GH like Karamba [0] and interesting physics engines like Kangaroo [1].
Be careful, it wasn't the current Chinese regime that executed the rash of infrastructure improvement projects in Hong Kong in the 90's. In fact, the vast majority of the projects were initiated and executed by large British engineering and architectural firms to milk as much money out of building projects prior to the turn over to Chinese rule in 1999.
I didn't even want to make any claims about China. Maybe the super airport makes business sense. Just saying that a pretty appearance doesn't prove that a great economy is behind it.
i just think that is an assumption by the reader that these companies in (even these companies in their present form) will make the founders billionaires. I think it is safer to assume that the experience gained is more likely to lead them to be come billionaires in future endeavors rather than in these companies or even their next.
