Developments in Structural Form

In the critically acclaimed first edition of this book, Mainstone offered a brilliant and highly original account of the structural developments that have made possible the achievements of architects and bridge builders throughout history.In this extensively revised and expanded new edition, now available in paperback, new insights and a full coverage of recent developments in both design and construction are incorporated. The book identifies features that distinguish the forms built by man from those shaped by nature and discusses the physical and other constraints on the choices that can be made. It then looks in turn at all the elementary forms - arches, domes, beams, slabs and the like - which combine into the more complex forms of complete structures, and at the different classes of the complete forms themselves. The development of each form is traced chronologically, but with an emphasis less on the chronology than on the problems that designers have continually faced in trying to serve new ends with limited means or to serve old ones in new ways. The book concludes with a chapter on the processes of design, showing how the designer's freedom of choice has been widened by a growing understanding of structural behaviour.

Preface; Part 1: Introductory: Introduction; Structural actions and materials; Construction and form; Structure and form; Part 2: Structural elements: Arches, vaults, domes, curved membranes, beams and slabs, trusses, portal frames, space frames, supports, walls, foundations; Part 3: Complete structures: Early forms; Pre-nineteenth-century wide-span buildings; Nineteenth-and twentieth-century wide-span buildings; Bridges; Multi-storey buildings and towers; Part 4: Design: Structural understanding and design.

Rowland Mainstone is an honorary architect as well as being a civil and structural engineer. Though chiefly engaged for some 30 years in research into many aspects of the design of buildings and bridges today, he has also undertaken extensive studies of their earlier history. More recently he has been a consultant on the structural conservation of historic buildings and a visiting professor of architecture and structure at several universities in this country and abroad.