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Why Switch to Shaping Structures: Statics?
 In the real world, architects and engineers do a lot more
than just calculate the adequacy of structural members:
Starting from a blank sheet of paper, they design whole
structural systems for buildings and bridges. This process involves selecting an
appropriate material and structural system, laying out the system, detailing it, working
out a construction process, and checking the adequacy of every part of the system with
calculations.
Of these many steps in the design process, only the calculations
have been taught at many schools of engineering and architecture. This has left students
without any preparation whatever in the all-important parts of the design process in which
the form of the structure is determined, the details are configured, and the construction
is planned. It has also left many structures teachers, especially in architecture
programs, as extraneous appendages to the departments in which they teach.
Shaping Structures: Statics Shaping Structures: Statics teaches structural calculations
in the context of the larger structural and architectural design process of which they are
a part. Its emphasis, as its title suggests, is on finding good forms for structures,
forms that are structurally efficient and appropriate to their use. It does so by using
the fundamentals of statics to find forms for arches, hanging cables, cable-stayed
structures, and trusses such that these structures experience only axial forces.
Thus students who are just beginning their study of structures find
themselves generating designs for exciting long-span roofs and bridges. Even in the first
chapter, in which students are introduced to the first equation of static equilibrium,
they are conducted through the process of sizing and detailing hanger straps for a tall
building. Several weeks later, they are not merely finding the forces in trusses, but
learning as well how to change the forms of trusses to improve their efficiency.
So why are teachers switching to Shaping Structures: Statics
as their statics text?
- Because they're tired of teaching and correcting the same infantile,
canned numerical exercises year after year.
- Because they can empower their first-term students to design
structures that rival those of the masters for grace and efficiency.
- Because they like to see the excitement grow as students acquire more
and more ability to shape beautiful long-span roofs and bridges.
- Because they like the sudden leap in the level and tone of their
teaching evaluations.
- Because they like to see their influence appear in tangible fashion
in the design studio projects that architecture students do throughout their years of
school.
- Because they enjoy teaching a group of students who love structures
classes and embrace them rather than endure them.
Because they are finally able to teach structures as design in the
fullest sense.
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