Reviving Art and Practice in Structural Engineering Education

Structural engineering education in the United States is not a static target. Traditionally, undergraduate engineering programs produced the bulk of new structural engineering practitioners. Emphasizing application over theory, the graduates of these programs designed great structural engineering triumphs from the late nineteenth century through the middle of the twentieth century. Engineering degree programs at colleges and universities, however, continued to evolve in response to both external and internal forces that shape the education received by engineers at any point in time. It is a given that the community of practicing structural engineers is never quite satisfied with the skills and education of the current crop of engineering graduates (Ketchum 1982; Hampton 1998). The relative weighting of whether this is because the older generation of engineers looks nostalgically on their own educational experience or if this is truly because of shortcomings in the current educational system for engineers may be debated. It can be said without much disagreement, however, that the declining number of credit hours required for the undergraduate civil engineering degree, combined with the almost complete change in the composition of the engineering faculty at most colleges and universities from teachers who taught from their own experience as designers to researchers who have never experienced the combined thrill and pressure of seeing one’s own design become reality in steel and concrete, has changed the face of structural engineering education.

Additionally, the increased complexity of current structural engineering practice has lead to the necessity of removing topics from the curriculum at the same time that additional topics need to be added. The National Council of Structural Engineering Associations (NCSEA) has developed a recommended minimum level of academic preparation of structural engineers as shown in Table 1 (Barnes 2004; Hung 2003). This minimum level of preparation necessarily assumes some basic core preparation (solid mechanics, graphics, etc.) that is often lacking in depth in some programs. The reality is that the NCSEA recommendation is a bare-bones minimum that cannot be considered to be an adequate introduction to the practice of structural engineering. Among other things, it leaves out an introduction to the art of the structural engineer. What is even more frightening is that this preparation is impossible to obtain even in many graduate-level programs, let alone at the undergraduate level.

Given that current faculty composition feels much more at home with instructing embryonic engineers in the scientific mathematical analysis of an element to the detriment of the art of envisioning and assembling a functional and constructible system, it is little wonder that the current crop of young structural engineers is handicapped in developing a true feel for structural design and all that it entails. Gauvreau (2003) goes so far as to state that “universities have not taught the creative aspects of structural engineering for at least thirty years” and that “the university has a responsibility . . . to become an active and important provider of design training.” This is a call to return to the fundamentals of structural engineering design in the undergraduate educational experience, a call to making art and practice the central focus of undergraduate structural engineering education rather than seeking to develop reluctant researchers.

While the current typical undergraduate engineering student is different demographically as compared to previous generations (less male and less Caucasian), the lure that draws them into structural engineering is the same—to build buildings and bridges and other great things. In the experience of both authors, television shows such as “Modern Marvels” and “Building Big” have played a role in enticing young adults into structural engineering. They see the excitement of designing and building. They want to create in steel and concrete. Unfortunately, what they increasingly are exposed to are academic exercises in science that seem to lead to nothing of the sort.

Most students are still intellectually malleable and trainable at this point in their careers. If they can be molded into visual thinkers and practical planners, they can be taught the art of structural design. What they see and learn from these television series is the “art” of structural engineering, but instead what they are fed academically is a rather thin gruel of “science” divorced from art.

Ferguson (1992) discusses at length the linkage between the visual image of the unconstructed object in the designers mind and the completed structure. Engineers who have been trained using methods that had inherent limitations on precision and speed soon developed a strong sense of scale and appropriateness of their designs (Chancey et al., 2005; Petroski 1985). Young engineers quickly learned to transfer the concept in their mind onto paper, which then made the leap into physical reality. Both authors find it difficult at best to perform any design beyond the most uncomplicated without resorting to the sketchpad to work out details. Unfortunately, the lure of supposed accuracy alluded to by computer simulations and CAD has broken this linkage in many, if not most, young engineers. Why should one painstakingly conceive of an entire structural system in one’s mind when the computer will do the same, only faster, and with greater scientific basis? However, much like most computer chess programs are no match for a chess grandmaster, nearly all computer programs are inferior in the development of structural plans when compared to a skilled master structural engineer using his or her mental eye. This growing graphical and visual illiteracy is a handicap.

Until recently, most engineers received at least one and often two semesters of drafting and technical sketching coursework, usually as part of their collegiate freshman year. These classes stressed manual drafting methods using the traditional instruments (compass, scale, dividers, irregular curve, T-square, etc.), and often included work in freehand technical drawing. Many times students entered these courses with one or more semesters of drafting in high school. Most courses stressed the fundamentals of section, projection, views, and development of shapes, and usually progressed on to elementary application. Using these skills as a basis, students continued to hone their skills in higher-level classes, producing working drawings of highway curves, survey plots, geotechnical logs, and structural plan and detail drawings. The end result was a young engineer who possessed fluency or at least a strong working vocabulary in the language that engineers most often communicate in: graphic representation. Able to make the leap from mind to paper to object, concept could spring to reality through representation on paper (Ferguson 1992).

Within the last ten years, however, courses in manual drafting and technical sketching have largely been replaced with work in CAD. It is the experience of the authors and others (Carrato and Kellogg 2004; Kivett 1998; Schwinger 2004) that the move to CAD has been in large part responsible for the growing graphical illiteracy of young engineers. Many have noted the severe degradation in the quality of structural construction documents since the implementation of CAD (Schwinger 2004) and the difficulty in understanding a structure in its entirety on the computer screen. If experienced engineers encounter this difficulty, how should we expect student engineers to develop an understanding?

Ferguson (1992) points out many instances where science has failed because designers have blindly assumed that the science of computer analysis must trump the art of understanding structural response. Tedesko (1994) provides the example of a young engineer who, in his analysis of a dome structure, could not see that the computer-generated response could not possibly reflect actual conditions. Unfortunately, this is more common than it is uncommon, as reported by Baruh (2001).

The first author makes it a habit of repeatedly asking his students to “feel what the structure is feeling” and to “put themselves in the place of the structure.” Structural engineering as art requires the practitioner to develop an intuitive feel for the response of the structure under load regardless of what the numbers from the computerized analysis may seem to indicate.

In his “Advanced Steel Design” and “Advanced Reinforced Concrete Design” courses, the first author teaches and mentors his undergraduate students toward developing professional-level construction documents, including plans and specifications, for a low rise building. Most students never have the opportunity to approach an open-ended project such as this, and are often terrified of the prospect of having to produce a product where there is no one correct answer. The “engineering science” to which they have been overwhelmingly exposed to has taught them that there is but one correct answer. The reality of the structural engineering “art” is that there are as many ways of solving a building design as there are engineers to perform the design. The first author (and the second author as his former student) note that many graduates of these classes continue to remark that this exposure to the open-ended art of structural engineering made their transition to practice much easier. Possibly the greatest revelation for these students is that design does not end until the result of that design is communicated in a manner that the constructor of that design can implement and transform into the physical reality of a completed structure. Unfortunately, their graphic illiteracy makes this communication of design intent difficult.

ABET (2004) has made an attempt to address the concern of art in design by providing all students with a “major design experience” through Criterion 4 of the 2006 evaluation criteria (“Students must be prepared for engineering practice through the curriculum culminating in a major design experience based on the knowledge and skills acquired in earlier course work and incorporating appropriate engineering standards and multiple realistic constraints”), the unfortunate result for structural engineers is that this “design experience” has been interpreted by ABET evaluators as necessarily being a broad civil engineering experience, and not focused on a specific area, such as structural design. Therefore, the advanced courses in steel and concrete design taught by the first author and similar worthwhile design experiences do not meet this criterion. This desire for breadth at the expense of depth in design education further chips away at valuable credit hours in already overloaded programs.

Others have pointed out the faults of having engineering faculty with little or no experience in actual engineering practice (Cross 1952; Hampton 1998). If one defines engineering as the art of creating physical reality and science as the act of studying reality, current engineering faculties are primarily populated with scientists, not engineers. This is not to say that there do not exist wonderful examples of educators who understand and clearly teach the fundamentals of the art of structural engineering design (as opposed to structural science), but the number of these educators is declining as a consequence of the rush to supposed research excellence as measured by the US News rankings.

A small number of programs have recognized this shortfall and have made honest attempts to hire practice-oriented faculty, but these hires have overwhelmingly been in nontenure-accruing, term-limited positions. While noble efforts, these attempts continue the divide between research faculty who are hired into permanent, tenure-accruing positions and temporary faculty. This separation exists primarily because schools of engineering have followed the research model of the arts and sciences for promotion and tenure of faculty rather than the practice model of professional schools of medicine and law. While the authors have no qualms with having a Tennyson poem dissected by a research scholar, they do have serious reservations about having their appendices removed by physicians who have studied under other physicians who have extensively written about abdominal surgery, but have never actually picked up a scalpel. Why should it be any different for the applied art of structural engineering? Why should practice and application be valued as lesser than fundamental research?

All this begs the question: “What should be done to improve the education of structural engineers?” A few readily apparent points are: