The collapse of the new terminal 2E at Paris' Charles de Gaulle must teach us lessons: we learn from the structural failures more than from our successes.
This is the moral of Henry Petroski's excellent To Engineer is Human, in which he makes this point again and again. We must learn from this mistakes, further our understanding of structures and their failure modes.
Another, more technical book on this same topic is Mario G. Salvadori's Why Buildings Stand Up; of course, when his grandmother saw the book, she said, "It'd be much more interesting to read about why buildings fall down, so he (with Matthys Levy) wrote about that, too.
The Kansas City hotel disaster which figures prominently into Salvadori's and Petroski's writing also forms the plot of Paul Auster's recent Oracle Night.
The tube-obsessed engineers who constructed CdG's new terminal attempted something revolutionary; the unfortunate aspect was that the structure was heavily-used and very public. To construct a tunnel in the open air, without the natural forces of the enclosing ground, is audacious.