Load path

node

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.

A node is not a place. Drawing it on a map would assert something about the world that no stored fact supports.