Today, structural engineers must spend a disproportionate amount of their time determining the loading criteria for their projects rather than designing the structures. When ASCE 7-88 replaced ANSI 58.1-82, the loading provisions became more complex and less intuitive. It contained all of the important stuff that had been missing from previous building codes, such as snow drift loads and a rational approach to wind pressures, yet it was still easy to understand and use. The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) Standard 58.1, first released in 1972, was a huge improvement. Although the loading provisions were easy to understand and interpret, they were not sufficient. When I first started practicing forty years ago, the building code section on structural loading was somewhat brief and only filled a few pages. There have been many editorials written about the misery that ASCE 7 has brought to the practice of structural engineering, yet I do not recall ever seeing an editorial extolling the virtues of the standard. Has ASCE 7 improved the practice of structural engineering or the lives of structural engineers? The answer is easy and not particularly controversial. If you get more than two structural engineers in a room, it is only a matter of time before they start complaining about the latest edition of ASCE 7 and the misery that it has brought to their practice.
I was particularly amused to see the way that the structural engineering community has rallied in defense of a standard that they openly despise. I have been watching, with some interest as the recent drama unfolded, the effort to block the adoption of the American Society of Civil Engineers’ ASCE 7-16 into the 2018 International Building Code (IBC).
0 kommentar(er)
