Materials:Strength - Strong or WeakMaterials like concrete are strong and so are favoured in some situations because it is hard to break

Stiffness - Stiff, flexible, stretchyMaterials like rubber are used for there flexible propeties, whereas metals are used when there is no movement wanted within the structure

Shape - mono, bi and tri dimensionalThe shape of a material can determine how it performs as well as its aesthetic qualitites

Material Behaviour - Tension/CompressionDifferent material behave differently under tension and compression. for example rope be-comes very floppy when not under tension

Economy and Sustainability A materials cost and impact on the environment are also heavily considered as a material needs to be cost effective to be used.

When building our structures in class we learnt a lot about how forces act on a structure. We were trying to achieve height using the bricks vertically in the cross pattern formation and stability by placing horizontal blocks between the vertical ones. The beam was contructed using rubber bands to help support a roof which never ended up occuring

Some other groups contructions were a little more succesful, one (right) utilized a circular cone shape to achieve a tall structure that included a roof, another group (left) created only a small cavity using tightly packed bricks and then a tall tower using a JENGA style brick pattern, this tightly compacted brick pattern helps achieve maximum stability but also uses a lot of bricks to achieve the height

Our second struc-ture was much shorter and therfore more stable. we made a roof utilizing the principles of cantelever, the structure was able to take weight on its roof because the forces were being distributed evenly under compression. However when the force became more concentrated the roof failed and collapsed as the roof needed to be entire-ly under compres-sion to hold the weight on top of it

Structural Systems

SolidVery old style, Using stones and bricks, Uses arches and takes advantage of compression

SkeletalMost modern way of tranfering loads to ground

MembraneUtilized in sports stadiums, very cheap but not as strong and du-rable as other systems

HybridCombines two or more structures to give buildings structural integrity

Fixed joints do not allow any movement. therefor if any expansion or compression happens it can cause weakness and breakage in the joint or the members

Roller and Pin joints are used to allow movement so that the forces acting on the bulding do not break the structure

The structure we made using the thin balse consisted of a tri angular base, because triangles offer the best compromise between stability and quanity of material required. our structure was not very stable as we found that not having any compression or tension caused the bulding to fall. This compression and tension was achieved by an-other group doing a similar contruction however they had put “X’s” in between there sections, these extra supports meant that their construction was more stable and was able to reach greater heights than ours was