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America at 250: A Virtual Tour of the Landmarks That Defined a Nation

Try The Visualization The American story is, at heart, a building story. It’s 250 years of believing that what looked impossible was merely difficult. Crews strung bridges across straits deemed uncrossable, raised towers that shattered records year after year, and pushed water hundreds of miles across the desert. Now you can explore that story through a virtual 3D tour. Built with Cesium, the open-source geospatial technology, the tour maps the engineering feats that physically united and powered a growing America, from harbor to desert to skyline. Here’s your roadmap: 1. The Statue of Liberty Designed by French sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi and dedicated in New York Harbor in 1886, the Statue of Liberty hides its engineering in plain sight. Beneath the 151-foot figure’s 62,000-pound hammered-copper robe is an internal iron framework engineered by Gustave Eiffel. This flexible skeleton lets the statue sway and expand in high winds and shifting temperatures. The entire monument was built in Paris, disassembled into 350 pieces, packed into 214 crates, and shipped across the Atlantic before being reassembled on its concrete pedestal—a triumph of 19th-century structural engineering and international logistics. Fun fact: The statue wasn’t always green. Her copper attire and skin, roughly two pennies thick,

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Designing Resilience: Why the Future of Infrastructure Depends on Openness and Connected Data

When Hurricane Sandy struck New York City in 2012, nature exposed the fragility of one of the world’s greatest cities. The storm flooded a critical power station and knocked out electricity across a large section of Manhattan. In neighborhoods throughout the five boroughs, a storm surge overwhelmed systems built for a different era.  New Yorkers felt the disaster’s effects for weeks after Sandy left. Subway and road tunnels flooded with salt water; parks, playgrounds, and beaches were damaged; and a gasoline shortage left drivers waiting in hours-long lines that snaked along the avenues, harkening back to the 1970s oil crisis. Dozens of people died in the storm, and the damage costs reached billions of dollars.  Taking stock of the disaster, city leaders realized they had to confront an uncomfortable reality: The future would bring more uncertainty, more extreme weather, and greater pressure on infrastructure.  https://youtu.be/AHtsTnDdlyM?si=2xVaCrmdjc7O-qOo One result of the city’s response was the Big U, an ambitious proposal for a flood-protection system wrapping around much of Lower Manhattan. In the latest episode of the Bentley Horizons podcast, we discovered that the Big U is about much more than flood walls. It’s a story about how resilient infrastructure is conceived, designed, built, and operated, and about how architects and engineers are asking their software providers to think in whole systems rather than disconnected

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New Study: How Digital Intelligence is Enabling Infrastructure Resilience for a Climate-Disrupted World

The Gulf of Mexico is coming for New Orleans, and the global infrastructure sector is paying attention. Roughly 125,000 years ago, the shoreline sat about 30 miles north of the city. Recent research predicts that rising seas could push the coast that far inland again, eventually leaving the Big Easy underwater. For now, the city’s defenses are holding, and engineers are racing to make them smarter—including one of the most critical assets, the 17th Street Canal pump station, which discharges stormwater during major storms. To make the station more reliable, resilient, and responsive, Louisiana engineering organization Forte & Tablada built a cloud-based, collaborative digital twin of the facility that gives engineers, asset managers, and emergency planners virtual insights before, during, and after storm events. The work is also expected to save 4,000 hours of engineering work. The project is among a handful of case studies included in a new global report released to coincide with London Climate Action Week, which runs June 20-28. The work in New Orleans, along with other projects that used Bentley Systems software, are included as examples for others to follow. The study, titled Beyond Reactive: How Digital Intelligence Is Enabling Infrastructure Resilience For A Climate-Disrupted

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Inside the AI Experiment That Recreated the Gherkin, One of London’s Most Iconic Towers

Before the London office tower had a name, it had a shape. Rising 41 stories, wrapped in a steel lattice, and clad in shaded glass that tapered to a point at the top, it looked like a futuristic Easter egg. But when the tower’s elongated curves caught the sun and shimmered in pale teal, Londoners saw something different: a gherkin. The affectionate name stuck.  The twisting form of the tower, officially named 30 St Mary Axe and designed by Foster + Partners, turned heads well before it was finished. It kept Londoners guessing how it would look and how it could possibly be built. The design firm’s founder, Norman Foster, had long argued that architects must advocate for new ideas. He believed the building was genuinely radical—and when it opened in 2004, much of the architectural world agreed. It was one of the most innovative and energy-efficient towers in the world, and it looked like nothing else on London’s skyline.  One of the team members working on the Gherkin was Stuart Milne, now a product manager at Bentley Systems, the global infrastructure engineering software company. Taking Foster’s maxim to heart two decades later, Milne has also done something radical: He

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The Hunt for Infrastructure’s Lost Data Comes to Philadelphia, with AI Joining the Search

A road sign clipped by a passing truck shouldn’t be hard to replace, but the reality is not so simple. The maintenance crew is often left guessing: What were the sign’s dimensions, its federal code, the grade of reflective film on its face, the company that made it, its warranty? Each of those details was recorded at some point. Yet somewhere between the drawing board and the side of the highway, the information got lost. Nicole Williams, digital delivery practice leader at the engineering firm Kimley-Horn, is too familiar with this scenario. She said a worker should be able to “pull up your database, click on it, and it gives you all of that information. Right now, it’s not accessible.” It was one of several examples she used to stress the value of connected data during her keynote at the Cesium Developer Conference in Philadelphia in early June. Her address resonated with the roughly 400 engineers and software developers in the room. Engineers design in data-rich 3D models, Williams explained, then flatten everything into a “2D” PDF for the contractor. By the time a project reaches the crews who operate and maintain the finished bridge or highway, much of the

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Engineers Built a Bridge Inspection Training App in Three Days. It Could Help Fix America’s Decades-Long Infrastructure Crisis.

America has more than 600,000 bridges, and a growing number are approaching the end of their useful life. More than a third, some 220,000, need major repairs or outright replacement, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers, which gave the nation’s bridge infrastructure a C grade in its 2025 Infrastructure Report Card. And there’s more: The engineers trained to do the work are retiring and not being replaced fast enough. “Not enough new engineers and inspectors are entering the workforce to keep up with the rapidly growing demand for their skills,” says Barritt Lovelace, vice president of emerging technologies at global engineering firm Collins Engineers. A three-day hackathon in London offered a glimpse of a solution to start chipping away at the crisis. In May, Lovelace joined forces with Bentley Labs at Bentley Systems’ London office with a single goal: build an intuitive, virtual bridge-inspection training platform. The team used GitHub Copilot, an AI coding assistant, and a technique in which developers guide AI to generate software through natural-language prompts. And in just three days, they built what had previously taken six months. The result is a training app that bridge inspectors anywhere in the world can use to

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The Night the Lights Went Out: Engineering—And Experiencing—New York’s New Resilient Coastline 

On the night of October 29, 2012, Hurricane Sandy roared ashore in New Jersey, driving a wall of water toward one of the most densely populated coastlines in the world. New York City had braced for a flood, but what caught officials by surprise was the magnitude: The swell arrived at the peak of high tide, and the two forces together sent the East River surging over its banks with a fury no one anticipated.  As water rushed upstream, the East River crested its banks and saltwater poured into the control room of Con Edison’s East River Generation Station, located at the northern edge of Manhattan’s East Village. Several blocks inland, at Con Edison’s Avenue A substation, senior operator Donnie Wilson watched the lights on his board flicker and die as the flooded power plant disconnected from the grid. “It was a scary situation just to sit in the dark,” he recalls. “I never experienced anything like that.”  Con Edison is New York City’s largest utility. Its electrical system connects more than 3.5 million customers to energy sources and serves almost 40% of New York State’s electric demand, while covering only about 1% of the state’s geographic footprint.  When the storm hit, firefighters

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Inside the Swiss Symposium Reimagining How We Design and Build

In the Swiss Alpine village of Mulegns, a bone-white tower rises 30 meters from the valley floor. Skeletal in its design, Tor Alva is the tallest 3D-printed structure in the world—each component fabricated by robots in Zurich, then trucked 175 kilometers for assembly. It is a fitting symbol for a moment when digital tools are fundamentally changing what’s possible in the built world. And it made for a natural centerpiece at the Future of Construction symposium, held last month at ETH Zurich—the storied Swiss science and technology university where many of those tools were invented. The symposium was sponsored this year by Bentley Systems, the infrastructure engineering software company, and put on by the Center for Augmented Computational Design in Architecture, Engineering, and Construction at the Digital Fabrication Lab at ETH. The event brought together engineers, architects, academics, and technologists to explore how robotics, artificial intelligence, and extended reality are reshaping the way we design and build. Attendees were treated to a bus tour to Tor Alva—a short trip into the mountains that doubled as a live demonstration of just how far digital fabrication has come. There’s synergy between Bentley and ETH. As the global company behind some of the

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Verdantix: Bentley Conference Spotlights Infrastructure’s Coming Data Crisis and Points to Solutions

At the Bentley Systems Illuminate Berlin 2026 conference, infrastructure engineers and technology leaders met to confront a massive infrastructure challenge already visible in the numbers: Europe faces €12 trillion in infrastructure investment needs by 2040.  Independent research and advisory firm Verdantix, which covers industrial and infrastructure technology, attended the event and characterized it as a significant moment for the infrastructure sector, underscoring the urgent challenges facing the industry. In a report following the conference, Verdantix analysts Sophie Planken-Bichler and Annemarie Briggs highlighted that fragmented data—including information lost at handover, siloed across disciplines, and underused in operations—remains the industry’s most consequential unsolved problem.  “The overarching message was clear: The sector is not heading towards a sudden breaking point, but a slow, predictable crisis that leaders can already quantify but are struggling to address,” the analysts wrote. “Mounting pressure from aging assets, climate stress, and growing system complexity is converging, stretching infrastructure built in the mid‑20th century far beyond its intended lifespan.”  Verdantix also highlighted the importance of themes woven throughout the conference: connected data, open standards and interoperability, and artificial intelligence (AI). The firm noted that digital twins are moving beyond design into operations, with projects such as China’s Tianshan Shengli Tunnel and the Netherlands’ A16 motorway demonstrating how digital twins, subsurface intelligence, and lifecycle data reduce risk before construction begins and feed operational insight back into future design decisions. Regarding AI, the Verdantix analysts struck a cautionary note: Technology is accelerating productivity in planning and risk analytics, but it amplifies weak data governance just as readily as strong practice. It must be guided

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From Code to Command: How AI Is Rewiring the Way Engineers Design Infrastructure

Artificial intelligence is beginning to change the daily work of civil and structural engineers. But where do AI capabilities actually stand in the industry? More than 1,000 engineers from around the world recently gathered for a Bentley Systems event to gauge the rapid advances AI is making in their sector. The session covered two distinct but connected ideas: how engineers who do not program can use AI tools to start automating their workflows, and how new Model Context Protocol (MCP) server technology could eventually make the coding step unnecessary altogether. (Bentley engineers, for example, have already successfully used AI agents to redesign a steel structure and cut its weight by 40%.) The hour-long session offered the clearest look yet at how AI is starting to shift the day-to-day work of civil and structural engineers, from Python and AI-enabled coding tools to MCP, which lets AI assistants like Claude or Copilot talk directly to engineering software. Think of MCP like a translator for AI agents: Instead of engineers spending hours clicking through menus to run calculations, they can type a plain English sentence—”optimize this steel frame”—and the AI agent does it automatically inside the STAAD software, in full compliance with the

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