In the late 19th century, the physicist Plateau conducted experiments where he submersed copper wires of various shapes in a soap solution to produce soap films spanning the wire. These experiments were done in pursuit of understanding the following natural question posed by Lagrange a century prior: "given a fixed boundary, does there exist a surface minimizing area amongst all surfaces spanning the boundary?" It was only in the 1970s that a robust mathematical framework was developed to settle this question of existence and regularity of area minimizing surfaces. In this talk, we aim to discuss the fundamental ideas of this framework, called Geometric Measure Theory, towards an understanding of the structure of the singularities of area minimizing and minimal surfaces.