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Why the buildings of the future will be shaped by ... you | Marc Kushner

Mar 2015  |  18min  |  TED

"Architecture is not about math or zoning — it's about visceral emotions," says Marc Kushner. In a sweeping — often funny — talk, he zooms through the past thirty years of architecture to show how the public, once disconnected, have become an essential part of the design process. With the help of social media, feedback reaches architects years before a building is even created. The result? Architecture that will do more for us than ever before.

 


Kanopy videos

Building Up: Columns and Buckling

2011  |  32min

One of the most potent human aspirations supported by engineering is to build up. Learn how this has been done from antiquity to the present with columns: structural members that carry load primarily in compression. You'll also learn about buckling: the often catastrophic stability failure that occurs in columns with certain geometric characteristics.

 


Building Across: Beams and Bending

2011  |  31min

Materials profoundly influence the form, function, and structure of great buildings, bridges, and towers. Using steel (which is superior in terms of strength, ductility, and stiffness) as a benchmark, compare the structural properties of wood, masonry, concrete, and iron: and see them at work in thousands of years' worth of structures.

 


From Wood to Steel: Properties of Materials

2011  |  31min

Materials profoundly influence the form, function, and structure of great buildings, bridges, and towers. Using steel (which is superior in terms of strength, ductility, and stiffness) as a benchmark, compare the structural properties of wood, masonry, concrete, and iron: and see them at work in thousands of years' worth of structures.

 


Internal Forces, Stress, and Strength

2011  |  31min

Use the Simple Tension Test (pulling on a structural element until it reaches the breaking point) as a gateway to understanding the concepts of internal force, stress, and strength. Then, see these concepts at work in structures such as the Golden Gate Bridge and Athens' Olympic Velodrome.

 

 


Loads and Structural Systems

2011  |  31min

Structures are heavily influenced by the loads they're designed to carry. First, take a closer look at the most important loads structures must resist, including traffic loads and earthquake loads. Then, using the historic iron building at Watervliet Arsenal in New York, analyze how loads are actually transmitted through structural systems along load paths.

 


Trusses: The Power of the Triangle

2011  |  32min

Trusses, the subject of this fascinating episode, are rigid frameworks composed of structural members connected at joints and arranged into networks of triangles. Learn how they work to stabilize and support a range of structural wonders, including the Brooklyn Bridge and: most famously: the Eiffel Tower.

 


The Rise of Iron- and Steel-Framed Buildings

2011  |  32min

How did iron and steel revolutionize building design? Find out in this trip back to late 18th- and early 19th-century Europe and America, where iron-framed structures: such as sheds at England's Chatham Dockyard, New York City's Equitable Life Insurance Building, and Chicago's First Leiter Building: would set the stage for modern skyscrapers.

 


Vast Roof Systems of Iron and Steel

2011  |  32min

The need for roofs spanning large enclosed spaces led to a startling number of new structural systems in the last 200 years. Look closer at long-span structural configurations in places such as the Houston Astrodome, the Berlin Hauptbahnhof, and even the Hartford Civic Center (the collapse of which offers a lesson in the risks of innovation).

 


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