Form and Forces: Designing Efficient, Expressive Structures
Category: Books,Engineering & Transportation,Engineering
Form and Forces: Designing Efficient, Expressive Structures Details
From the Back 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, Gaudí, 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 Read more About the Author EDWARD ALLEN has taught for more than thirty years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Yale University, and the University of Oregon. He is the bestselling author of Fundamentals of Building Construction, Fifth Edition. WACŁAW ZALEWSKI is Professor Emeritus of Structural Design at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Read more
Reviews
Ed's review says it all but I thought I'd chime in here. I have spent a considerable amount of time and money researching books that would provide a comprehensive, creative, and intuitive education in structural engineering. Sadly most of the books I found were dry and virtually impossible to creatively apply, or very creative but devoid of any science. I was pretty much set on reading a handful of dry books (with my eyelids taped open if necessary) and supplementing it with a handful of creative books (with constant reference to the dry books) and hope that I could start seeing and thinking properly. One chapter into this book, plus a perusal of the other chapters, was all it took to clear my shelf and focus my efforts on learning from this book and its online companion materials. It has it all, and it explains it all in a way us non-textbook people can both understand and get excited about studying. Yeah that's right - this book will make you WANT to learn structural engineering.This book is for enterprising product designers, architects, or others interested in knowing how forces interact with structures and how creative thought can minimize effort and material while creating a structure that can withstand the forces applied to it. It is long and thorough so do not expect a light treatment. Buy with confidence and use for life.
