Form and Forces: Designing Efficient, Expressive Structures [With Access Code] Hardcover - 2009

From the rear cover

FINDING GOOD FORMS FOR STRUCTURES--A GRAPHICA APPROACH

In Form and Forces, bestselling authors Edward Allen and Waclaw Zalewski offer a fresh, new approach to the study of structures for students and practitioners of architecture and structural engineering. Emphasizing graphics rather than mathematics and rote learning, Form and Forces teaches statics and strength of materials in the context of a set of projects that involve students in the entire process of designing elegant, long-span structures, from concept generation to detailing and planning for construction.

Readers engage in such projects as a hanging roof for a transportation terminal, a concrete shell roof for a basketball arena, a wood truss roof for a summer camp activities building, cantilevered concrete shells to cover a stadium grandstand, and other fascinating, real-world designs. As they pursue these projects, students learn each fundamental structural design technique as it is needed, in the context in which it is useful, making it easy to remember and employ the principles discussed, including:

• Statics

• Bending and buckling behavior

• Finding form and forces for long-span structures

• Beam and column formulas

• The choice and layout of framing systems

Supplemented by a companion Web site with step-by-step graphic statics tutorials, interactive learning tools, and a special-purpose graphic statics solver program, Form and Forces allows every architect and engineer to employ the almost magical power of graphical techniques for generating good form.

Form and Forces equips the reader with simple, powerful tools employed by the great structural designers of the past 150 years--from Eiffel, Gaud, and Maillart, to Schlaich and Calatrava--so that even beginners can design entire structures that are elegant and exciting.

Companion Web site: www.wiley.com/go/formandforces

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Citations

• Scitech Book News, 03/01/2010, Page 137