Load path

Assembled from 34 blocks · 1 evidence · 45 related

1. Story
2. The route by which the weight of a building, and everything it carries, travels to the ground. Every structural system in this Journey is an answer to the same question: how do you get load down without asking any material to do the thing it is worst at? Stone, brick and unreinforced concrete are strong in compression and weak in tension, so pre-industrial building is largely the art of arranging mass so that only compression occurs; timber, wrought iron and steel are strong in tension, so industrial building can afford slender members that are pulled as well as pushed. A load path also has a horizontal component that beginners miss: an arch, a vault and a dome all push outwards at their springing, and the history of large spans is mostly the history of what absorbs that outward thrust - massive walls, buried fill, iron chains, external buttresses, or a steel ring.
3. Knowledge
4. Load path
5. Megalithic post-and-lintel construction
6. The voussoir arch
7. The steel skeleton frame
8. Connections
9. The voussoir arch
10. The steel skeleton frame
11. Megalithic post-and-lintel construction
12. Burj Khalifa
13. The steeper dome is dedicated
14. Colosseum (Flavian Amphitheatre), Rome
15. Pont du Gard
16. Load path
17. Corbelling (the false arch and false dome)
18. Corbelling (the false arch and false dome)
19. The dome
20. The Gothic rib vault
21. Roman builders adopt pozzolanic concrete
22. The Pont du Gard carries an aqueduct on three tiers of arches
23. The Colosseum opens: arch and concrete at civic scale
24. Load path
25. Structural steel
26. The curtain wall
27. Home Insurance Building, Chicago
28. The Home Insurance Building is completed in Chicago
29. Demolition supplies the evidence for the claim
30. Load path
31. Stonehenge
32. The sarsen circle and trilithons are raised at Stonehenge
33. Evidence
34. Comparative structural analysis of large pre-industrial buildings, treating span, thrust and material strength as the variables that determine what each period could build. Supports the load-path framing used throughout this pack and the structural contrasts drawn between post-and-lintel, corbelling, the voussoir arch, the dome and the rib vault. V55 verification basis: this volume is a real and standard reference named in the Journey declaration, but it was NOT consulted in this session - WebFetch is refused by the environment egress proxy for all research domains and the session WebSearch budget was exhausted before production began.