NYTimes: Engineering a Safer, More Beautiful World, One Failure at a Time

From his vantage point, failures in design and construction present perfect teaching opportunities. They are object lessons in the history and practice and beauty of engineering. "Failure is central to engineering," he said in an interview. "Every single calculation that an engineer makes is a failure calculation. Successful engineering is all about understanding how things break or fail."

I've read a few of Petroski's books for personal interest, a few when I was researching the engineering profession a year or so ago. Recommended.