Making and Testing Structures

An understanding of structures is essential to the student’s ability to work with building elements at various scales. The exercise begins the process with an introduction to the state of equilibrium and types of load. A theoretical understanding of failure and states of stress like tension, compression, shear,  bending, and torsion is then applied as the students explore diff erent types of structures and identify the reasons for failure in each of them. 
They work with tower frames, spanning members,  cantilever members, and plates, and resolve the reasons for failure that they have identified, by proposing junctions and joinery appropriate to the load distribution and material of the structure. 
At this stage of the process, the exercise brings  concreteness to the learning and encourages  exploration and arriving at different possibilities to  respond to the failures identified