Steel does have a major use in your skyscraper but concrete is perhaps the main player.
Conc is a wonderful and bloody complicated material and so is steel.
Steel is basically iron+(stuff) - Fe 'n' that. If you add small amounts of carbon to iron you get steel and depending on how you do it you transform iron (brittle, hard etc) to a material that is "tough". Tough generally means that it will resist stress/strain more and will fail gradually rather than catastrophically quickly. If you add some other elements, such as chromium you get stainless steel. I can't precis a three year degree into a paragraph but this gets you started!
Conc is a remarkable material, which we think was invented by the Romans. It sets and cures rather than "dries" so will will quite happily work underwater - provided you stop the constituents being carried away by currents. Setting conc involves an exothermic reaction so it heats up - too much in one pour can set itself on fire!
Add steel in the form of "rebar" to conc and you have a material that is nigh on magic in its properties but you do need to know what you are doing. You can simply put C section steel plates in your beams or run FeCr rod through and tension the nuts (lol)
Conc n steel are the modern building blocks of the modern world. I'd like to see a lot more wood ...
Folks interested in such material science topics should definitely read about Wootz steel[1] (Damascus steel[0]) and roman concrete [3]. Its very hard [2] to concoct a high fidelity version of these today, mainly because it is hard to get the trace constituents right.
I could try to dig out my college reading list (it was actually Plymouth Polytechnic - that's Plymouth, Devon, UK) but it was 30 odd years ago. Things have moved on a bit but not too much.
Do you have a general interest in Civil Engineering or a particular project in mind?
Digging through your stuff would be a bridge too far :) My interest was bc this is a field that I know absolutely nothing about, and so the examples you give were suggestive of an exotic world. If there was something that could sketch out that world in the manner you did, it would be mind-expanding.
I like things that give me a look into a proximate universe that I'd never otherwise pursue, e.g., if I could read a really interesting piece about botany, or modern dance, or challenges in agriculture, or the Michael Jordan of show horses, or the world's most controversial geologist ...
The last two are useful for DIY. That lot is just concrete. Geotechnics and hydrology are also fascinating.
When I studied this stuff we had a class where we grabbed some time to use the Poly's (Polytechnic - a bit like a second tier University back in the day - UK) electron microscope. I over focussed on our sample and vapourised it! We were studying "concrete cancer" which is a bit of a problem in maritime towns because salt in the air is one of the components needed.
I went to Plymouth (Devon, UK) Poly, which is famously a sea town and so we saw a lot of conc cancer, eg the Drake Circus multi story car park.
