The show “Why Structures Fail: Challenges to Engineering Design,” on display at the City College of New York, could do away with the “why” in the title.

The exhibition is little more than a few poster boards in the atrium of the college’s Morris R. Cohen Library, but it drives home a simple message that resonates all the more in light of recent high-profile accidents at New York’s construction sites: Structures fail, and the engineer’s job isn’t so much to stop the failures as it is to plan around them.

The engineering term is “redundancy,” and the exhibition is a rogue’s gallery of historical moments when, because of human error or poor design, structures suffered catastrophic failures.

One, the dramatic Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse of 1940, is a case study taught in every architecture and engineering class. The bridge, nearly identical in design to the Whitestone Bridge and completed just one year later, was buffeted by high winds that caused the roadway to undulate like a roller coaster. Still, engineers ruled it was safe, and for six months cars crossed the bucking structure until finally torsional pressure caused it to twist and collapse. No people died (sadly, a skittish dog did), but the failure was captured on film, and like all spectacular disasters, it’s available for viewing on YouTube.

The history of civilization is the history of infrastructure. Classical Rome didn’t have architects, only engineers, and while we think of it as a city of monumental buildings, it was the aqueducts and sewers that enabled the ancient capital to swell to a population of more than 1 million residents, a number unsurpassed anywhere in the world until the 19th century.

Likewise, New York prospers because of its infrastructure. Take away the city’s museums and it would feel hollow, sell the Yankees and our collective heart would break, but if the bridges and tunnels collapsed, New York would die.

Fortunately, the Whitestone is not the Tacoma Narrows. In Washington, the engineers trimmed the structure and used slimmer but solid beams under the roadway instead of girders, which on the Whitestone allow strong winds to pass through.

And John F. Kennedy International Airport isn’t Paris’s Charles de Gaulle. Another case examined in the exhibit is the 2004 collapse of Charles de Gaulle’s Terminal 2E, which had been open just a few months when it failed. Investigators now think that a sudden drop in temperature caused incorrectly installed steel beams to contract, but architect Paul Andreu’s elegant design deserves some blame: The structure, a soaring concrete tube perforated with windows, offered little room for structural redundancy.

A few months later, Dubai International Airport’s Terminal 3, also a concrete tube designed by Mr. Andreu, collapsed and killed five workers. But so far, so good for Mr. Andreu’s year-old Grand National Theater of China, which isn’t so much a tube as a bubble, and which stands proudly just to the side of Tiananmen Square.

It’s worth thinking about all of this in the middle of the Bloomberg building boom. It’s easy to see that a bridge or dramatic airport terminal is largely a feat of engineering, but every high-rise condo and office tower is as much about structure as it is architecture and marketing. These are buildings that aren’t supposed to fall down.

But sometimes they do. On September 11, 2001, the 47-story Building 7 at the World Trade Center collapsed at 5:20 p.m., hours after it was first damaged. Engineers now think it was largely because unchecked fires weakened the building’s metal frame: The sprinkler system wasn’t fully automatic, and firefighters didn’t have enough pressure to extinguish the flames with their hoses. The building was strong enough to stand despite the destruction around it, but its redundant system, the sprinklers, failed.

The two recent crane collapses in this city were horrifying, but they were relatively minor accidents when compared to the failures explored in the exhibit. And they may well draw attention to the fact that in a dense, hyper-developed city such as New York, more thought and resources should be devoted to the geeky, unsexy, and expensive business of making sure buildings stand up, even after they’ve been knocked around.

Through October 10 (138th Street and Convent Avenue, 212-650-7271).