Would pillow fort engineering become a more serious field?
The boring answer is that we’d use different materials for construction. Or we’d find a way to make them suitable for construction, like how we turn sand and gravel into concrete, or pack snow into ice blocks.
This is the human way.
<thing> is not behaving the way I want it to? Fuck with it until it does.
Concrete may be hard, but it can’t deal with tension that well, this is why we add rebar to it, it makes it able to deal with enough tension that it gets useful as a building material.
The same principle would apply to pillows, pillows are soft and squishy, put them in a vacuum bag and suck out the air, and you wiuld have a pillow and a plastic bag turned into a sort of a brick.
In construction we modify the raw materials to fit the purpose we need them to.
This is a very unique question. I’ve never seen it in the other place or anywhere else.
Probably people would just pack materials harder into brick molds and carry on as usual though.