Copyright: © Institute of Structural Concrete

Applicants: Jan Dirk van der Woerd, Stephan Geßner, Carolin Stapenhorst, Josef Hegger
(Institute of Structural Concrete, Faculty 3 | Junior professorship Tool-Culture, Faculty 2)

Project participants: Aryan Mirfendereski, Gesa Pauli, Luca Claußen, Anita Steinhoff, Kerstin Meerbach

Financed by the "Exploratory Teaching Space (ETS)", RWTH Aachen University

Goal:

Supporting structures can be found everywhere in our everyday live. Every building has a supporting structure; every object can reduced down to its supporting structure and even the human skeleton is a supporting structure. Many students in architecture and civil engineering aren’t aware of this when they are confronted with supporting structures during civil engineering and static lectures. The importance of the teaching content is often not recognized by the students as the comprehension of and sense for the force flow is still undeveloped. Furthermore, the approach to the topic “supporting structures” is very different in the academic teaching fields architecture and civil engineering. Architects are more interested in the whole supporting structure and focus on its use, spatiality, and the impact on the surrounding space, whereas civil engineers learn to differentiate supporting structure into their single parts and to calculate the construction itself. There is rarely interaction between the two very close fields even though both highly need each other and work together all the time in everyday professional life. In the context of the applied research program a wide digital exposé collection of remarkable buildings will be created. The supporting structure will be introduced extensively and analysed in detail in this exposé. It should show the architect's perspective as well as the civil engineer's perspective towards supporting structures to improve the comprehension for each other. The digital exposé gives students the possibility to improve their analytic skills, to find new problem-solving approaches, to strengthen innovative thinking and promote their creativity. These skills as well as the understanding for the others’ approach are for architects and civil engineers equally important. The exposé selection is seen as an addition to the existing courses for now but a development to an independent online-lecture is also possible.