explores aspects of the design process
The relationship between architectural design and structural engineering is the focus of "Reading Structures," the 31st issue of Perspecta, the School of Architecture's groundbreaking journal.
"This issue considers how structural engineering plays a role in the design process," says Carolyn Ann Foug '95 M.Arch., one of the volume's editors. Foug currently works at Gluckman Mayner Architects in New York. Her coeditor was Sharon L. Joyce '96 M.Arch., an architect based in Austin, Texas.
"Reading Structures" explores the collaboration between architects and engineers, and considers what happens when a design is transformed into an actual structure.
"When structure is admitted into the realm of ideas, one finds that there is something meaningful about gravity and wind, something poetic about post tensioning and bending stresses," writes Foug, explaining the journal's topic. "When these discoveries are followed up with a thorough understanding of precisely how structure works, then an image of a building that is bending, straining and alive comes into focus in exquisite detail."
The volume traces the cultural history of architectural and industrial structures and the connection between form and material. The inside covers fold out to reveal a timeline of structural development that extends from prehistoric masonry structures to the Millennium Tower in Tokyo. The issue also includes essays on the structure of spider webs, definitions of "force" from a broad range of philosophical positions and personal interviews with architects on how structure is addressed in current practice (and what kind of toys they played with as children).
Among the 12 architects, engineers and historians who contributed articles to the journal are two former deans of the School of Architecture -- Thomas H. Beeby, now professor of architecture, and Herman D.J. Spiegel, now professor emeritus of architectural engineering.
Frederick Tang was managing editor of "Reading Structures." The publisher is the MIT Press.
Founded in the early 1950s, Perspecta is the oldest student-edited architectural journal in the United States, its pages devoted to the latest artistic, historical and theoretical aspects of architecture. From its earliest issues, essays published in Perspecta have changed the way people think about architecture.
Like a Law Review at a law school, Perspecta is produced by the School of Architecture's top students, who solicit and edit articles from distinguished scholars and practitioners around the world. Students select topics and themes that they consider important and exciting.
"The publication of Perspecta marked the beginning of a new kind of critical discourse about architecture," says Robert A.M. Stern, dean of the Yale School of Architecture, who was editor of the journal in 1965, when he was a student at Yale. "Although Perspecta has never been a mass-market publication, its impact on the field has belied its numbers. The journal was -- and continues to be -- an intellectual showpiece for the Yale School of Architecture and an important presence in the design community."
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