Customer Reviews

Form and Forces: Designing Efficient, Expressive Structures

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This book is amazing and all structural engineers and architects, students included, should have this on their bookshelves. But more importantly than having it in your library is actually plunging into it and learning from it because if you learn these techniques they will completely transform the way you think about structural form and forces. I have been using this book in my classes, one class is taught to architecture students and the other to structural engineering students. The results have been astounding, the architecture students are empowered by the form finding tool of graphic statics and the engineers are thrilled by the beauty and logic of the force finding process. Both groups of students came up with dozens of elegant and efficient structures by linking the forces to the forms, and that is what I mean by "life changing". I find myself totally enthralled by this method and the power it unleashes. I have a PhD in structural engineering and I am a registered engineer in California and I have never been so excited about a technique as I am with this one. The book is clearly written, down to the level of having figures and text match up on the page so you don't have to flip pages to refer to a figure. Some exercises are straightforward, so much so that I taught them to 6th graders as an outreach exercise. Other sections are deeply connected to higher order theories and merit study from my graduate students. Many references are made to the giants of our profession who have used these techniques to design graceful and efficient structures. Yet the book manages to be all these things in a precise and clear manner. The authors really want you to understand each step thoroughly and they give you the tools needed to really understand important ideas about structural form.