A Recent Day, Smelly Braced Frames
Engineers have to straddle many worlds. We may find ourselves one day designing steel connections, then meeting on a new job to discuss appropriate structural systems, then doing some BIM modeling....
View ArticleThe Truth of Structural Design
There seems to be a progression of understanding as one designs structures. At first, as college students, we have well defined analytical techniques that appear objective and clear (there is truth)....
View ArticleHow do we improve our codes?
There are too many useless, confusing, burdensome, and disproportional provisions in our building codes. Useless provisions are those that are redundant or those provisions that are obvious....
View ArticleWhat We See Depends Mainly on What We Look For
What we see depends mainly on what we look for. [John Lubbock, British banker, politician, naturalist and archaeologist] If this is the case, what precedes this? What should we look for? This is...
View ArticleWhy Engineering Can Never be Codified
The code provides minimal information that is helpful to solve a particular problem. This is obvious to me as a practicing engineer so I get surprised when asked by some “what do you mean the code...
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Objective Beauty and Fazler Kahn
Last week, Structures Workshop was recommended for a very small project to a new client by the daughter of the great structural engineer Fazler Kahn, Yasmin Kahn (now Yasmin Byron). This was a great...
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Nervi’s Aesthetics and Technology in Building
Like artists, Engineers want to create beautiful words – when appropriate – as well as satisfying the science of efficiency and the art of economy. Nervi (1956) states that in order to do that, ones...
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Structural Art – Heat Plant at Brown University
One of the finest examples of structural art in Providence is Brown University’s Heat Plant on Llyod Ave. It is a hidden gem and combines the science of efficiency with the practice of economy and...
View ArticleScience is Applied Engineering
We were designing and building things long before we had a “scientific” methods and mathematical solution techniques – and we still do today. Did we need to wait for mathematical understanding of a...
View ArticleListening is an underrated sense to us Engineers
Seth Horowitz, an auditory neuroscientist at Brown University and the author of “The Universal Sense: How Hearing Shapes the Mind”, wrote a terrific article in the New York Times called The Science and...
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