experimenting with hydraulic drives that respond to unusual loads, which permits a structure to be made much thinner and lighter than usual. In this prototype, a curved wooden shell touches down at four points, three of which end at moveable hydraulic cylinders. A control system reads the load status at multiple points in the structure and moves the three free-floating points to counteract variable loads resulting from wind or snow. As a result, the shell can be much thinner than what you'd expect for its huge span: only four centimeters thick for 100 square meters of structure.
Imagine a bridge built with this system. You really wouldn't want to lose power to the control system while traffic was on the bridge.