Conference Presentations by César A Cruz
NCBDS #37 Conference Proceedings, 2022
Teaching building structures in the context of an undergraduate architecture curriculum often pri... more Teaching building structures in the context of an undergraduate architecture curriculum often privileges narrowly-focused, quantitative, engineering-based methods that relate to discrete building components (i.e., the analysi s and sizing of individual structural elements such as a beam, column, or truss). In reference to this conference's theme, this is akin to the concrete being subsumed by the abstract, what is readily apparent by the unseen, the blatant by the latent. In these situations, the potential pitfall is for students and instructors to be so consumed with the calculations typically employed in these courses (for example, calculating a bending moment, moment of inertia, section modulus, centroid, or slenderness ratio, to name just a few) that they fail to also see building structures in more wholistic ways. This situation is what one student described as "I can do structures. I just don't understand structures." This should not happen in our courses. Instead, the goal in a structures class should be for students to become adept across a spectrum that encompasses technical details and calculations, as well as the logic that governs the overal l system and its individual components.
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Conference Presentations by César A Cruz