With continuous urbanization, China,s annual new construction area is of about 2 billion m², as a result of which the theoretical and technical innovations for large-scale infrastructure construction are increasingly demanding. Scholars have found that organisms have unique external morphology and organizational structure by studying the phenomena of reinforcement and toughening, underwater adhesion, drilling and tunneling, light weight and high strength in nature. By imitating external morphology, structural characteristics or motion mechanism of organisms, they can provide new ideas, principles and theories for innovation and sustainable development of civil engineering. This paper mainly expounds the application of bionics in civil engineering from three aspects: bionic materials, bionic structures and bionic apparatus and constructions, and lists typical application cases. Finally, the bio-inspired civil engineering is summarized and prospected, which provides basic principles for future research. As an emerging research area, the basic theory of bio-inspired civil engineering is promising not yet perfect. Meanwhile, bio-inspired civil engineering involves the interdisciplinary research of biology, materials, structure and other disciplines, and it is necessary to carry out cooperation between different disciplines.