An Introduction to Structural Mechanics for Architects

This textbook offers an introductory course to structural mechanics for architects, including problems and solutions. It follows a completely different approach to structural mechanics than the usual books for engineering schools, making it much more attractive for architecture students and practitioners. It also offers a different point of view for engineering students, as it provides them with a more intuitive understanding of structural mechanics and the models therein.

Instead of studying the classical theory of linear elasticity and then particularizing it to simple structures, this book analyzes structures in a historic and also typological order. The book starts with cable structures and stone arches, followed by trusses and, finally, frame structures made of beams. For every typology, the latest, state-of-the-art theory in the field is introduced in a very didactic way.

David Gonzalez is Associate Professor of Continuum Mechanics in the Mechanical Engineering Department of the University of Zaragoza. His research activity focuses mainly on the development of numerical methods for the simulation of multi-scale and multi-physics problems in the fields of applied sciences and engineering. This includes the development or the improvement at the theoretical level of techniques such as the Natural Element Method. More recently, the work of Prof. Gonzalez has centred on the development of numerical techniques for multiscale simulation of materials, both solids and liquids. This line of research is based on the use of model reduction techniques, such as the Proper Generalized Decomposition (PGD) technique. These kinds of techniques allow the efficient simulating of problems defined in very high dimensional spaces (Schroedinger eq., kinetic theory approaches, among others). He has published more than fifty papers in the field.