This paper describes David Billington's efforts to improve American bridge design by bringing his insight concerning structural art to a range of bridge building agencies and their coordinating institutions, beginning with the Departments of Transportation of ...

The 2020 pandemic has laid bare the ambiguous value of the virtual proximity that distributed computing enables. The remote interaction it ushered in at an unprecedented scale also spawned social isolation, which is symbolically underscored by the reliance of ...

The internet has long been viewed as a cyberspace of free and collective information, allowing for an increase in the diversity of ideas and viewpoints available to the general public. However, critics argue that the emergence of personalization algorithms on ...

“Casting on a dump” focuses on finding accessible, low-tech fabrication methodologies that allow for the construction of parametrically designed nonstandard modular cast panels. Such an approach adopts a computational design framework using a single low-tech...

“Figure-ground” is an indispensable and significant part of urban design and urban morphological research, especially for the study of the university, which exists as a unique product of the city development and also develops with the city. In the past few d...

This paper aims to contribute to a history of computational design and to a historiography of the field by proposing a study of the development of sociotechnical networks of computation in architecture between 1965 and 2020 as shown in AD magazine. The researc...

Climate change continues to have noticeable and accelerated impacts on various territories. Previously predictable and recognizable patterns used by humans and nonhumans alike are perpetually being altered, turning localized signals into noise and effectively ...

Net structures, because of their minimal material waste and intuitive aesthetics, are gaining more interest recently. There are various efforts to redesign the tensile- and compression-only structures, as the computational tools and novel materials have broade...

The growing popularity of machine learning has provided new opportunities to predict certain behaviors precisely by utilizing big data. In this research, we use an image-based neural network to explore the relationship between the built environment and the act...

Reports show that numerous heritage sites are in danger due to conflicts and heritage mismanagement in many parts of the world. Experts have resorted to digital tools to attempt to conserve and preserve endangered and damaged sites. To that end, in this applie...

The author relates a partnership over several decades with his father, David P. Billington, in support of his father's teaching and research on structural art and engineering history.

This paper expands on David Billington's pioneering writings on the Spanish school and demonstrates construction innovations by two important 20 th century shell builders: Rafael Guastavino Jr. (1872-1950) and Eduardo Torroja (1899-1961), who each extended tra...

David Billington (1927 – 2018) was an educator who strove to increase the appreciation of structural art through his research, writings, lectures and ideas. This paper examines Billington's influence on structural engineering and practicing structural engineer...

This article examines three important aspects of bridge design that can provide guidance to engineers who wish to design bridges that embody efficiency, economy, and elegance, the three ideals of structural engineering defined by David P. Billington. These asp...

Volume II of the ACADIA 2020 Conference Proceedings contains the collection of Peer-Reviewed and Curated Projects presented during this year’s conference exhibition as well as essays from the winners of this year’s ACADIA Awards of Excellence. This volume al...

David Billington was a scholar of structural art and an inspirational educator who introduced generations of engineering students to the history and evolution of their discipline. This paper reflects on the author's time as a graduate student studying under Da...

To ensure unloading of the whole amount of stored product by gravity, the steel silos are often placed on supporting frame structure. The values of stresses in the joints between the thin shell and supporting frame elements are extremely high. It can cause loc...