The Lab

The software, references, and workflows that show up in every structural office.

How loads move from roof to floor to foundation — the load path.

Gravity systems, lateral systems, and why buildings stay standing.

From a real building to a structural model — assumptions, boundaries, and judgment calls.

How geography drives snow, wind, and seismic demands — and why where you build matters.

The permanent weight of the structure — calculated from material unit weights and dimensions.

The gravity loads set by occupancy type — look it up in ASCE 7 Table 4.3-1.

How ASCE 7 stacks loads to find the governing case.

Shear walls, braced frames, and moment frames — how buildings resist wind and seismic.

Floors and roofs as structural elements that collect and deliver force.

Columns, beams, and slabs as a coordinated load path.

How everything eventually gets to the ground.

What a deflected shape diagram shows — the beam's displaced position, exaggerated so you can see it.

What V(x) and M(x) diagrams mean — the internal force at every possible cut through the beam.

What a stress distribution across a cross-section means — axial, bending, and combined.

How to read a material's fingerprint — elastic, yield, plastic, and fracture.

Isolate a structure and account for every force acting on it.

Support types, reactions, and what makes a beam stable.

Rotational force — the most important concept in structural engineering.

Build a beam and watch the diagrams draw in real time.

How much force is packed into each square inch of a material.

How much a material stretches or compresses when you load it.

How much a beam actually moves when it's loaded — and why span dominates.

Why an I-beam is so much stiffer than a square bar of the same weight.

How a cross-section resists transverse shear — stress distribution, the web, and when shear actually governs.

Tension and compression — the simplest cross-sectional load case and the foundation for everything else.

Neutral axis, stress distribution, and why a deeper section is so much stronger than a wider one.

When a member carries both at once — the interaction equation and how two loads share a cross-section's capacity.

Limit states, resistance factors, and why codes are written the way they are.

Selecting a W-shape for flexure and shear — AISC provisions in practice.

Slenderness, buckling curves, and sizing a column for axial load.

Deflection limits, drift limits, and the checks that often govern over strength.

Translating a real structure into nodes, elements, and boundary conditions.

Point loads, distributed loads, load cases, and getting demands into the right places.

Reactions, diagrams, and displaced shapes — what the software is telling you.

Hand-check methods, equilibrium checks, and knowing when the model is lying to you.

Tracing gravity loads from roof to foundation — tributary areas, accumulation, and the full path.

Size a member, check it, resize — the back-and-forth that every real design requires.

How forces transfer between members — bolts, welds, and the details that hold it together.

What a complete set of structural drawings and calculations actually looks like.