Ingenious: John Ochsendorf - Issue 24: Error
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John Ochsendorf is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology whose work is devoted to understanding buildings of the past. An expert in masonry vaulting, he’s made a career of studying a style of construction that began millennia ago and practically disappeared with the Industrial Revolution. I met Ochsendorf in a nondescript lab on campus where a model of Rome’s Pantheon rested on a table. “I think the Pantheon is probably the greatest building of all time,” he says, and he hopes to use the model to demonstrate that the real building is stable enough as it is—even though it’s weathered and cracked—without the need for modern-day interventions like steel reinforcing. Ochsendorf, a MacArthur “Genius” Fellow, isn’t entirely comfortable in the spotlight; he says he’d rather ask me (...)