GST Armer (editor)
Spon Press
£45
CBD Stock No: 3482
Despite all the regulations on construction and health and safety that have engulfed us in recent years, buildings and structures continue to fail on a scale ranging from the inconvenient to the catastrophic with monotonous regularity.
Failure can occur even when a structure is put to the use it was designed for. Notorious examples include the London Millennium Bridge, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, Ronan Point flats and Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater (or Falling-in-the-Water as some like to call it).
Such failures would never have happened if the designers had evaluated data obtained by monitoring existing structures. Regrettably, most building performance data results from mere experimentation and is not backed up by the fruits of experience. But nowadays, performance data that simulates the fruits of experience can be readily obtained by modern means of monitoring, as Monitoring and Assessment of Structures makes clear.
Another vital function of monitoring and assessing existing structures is to provide data for maintenance works and to warn of possible impending failures. Monitoring and Assessment of Structures details how to get more accurate information on the performance of structures and buildings, and brings readers up to date on rapidly changing methods.
There are seven chapters by five different authors dealing with dynamic monitoring, photogrammetry, surveying type monitoring, practical bridge and building examples. If you ever wobbled your appalled way over the Millennium Bridge before it was fixed, you'll appreciate the section on measurement of damping in chapter 2. Unfortunately, much of the material in the first half of the book is too technical and hard to follow, although the second half is far more digestible, the practical examples being particularly instructive and interesting.
Another problem is the multiple authorship of the book. Because each author has their own particular style, you need to do a great deal of mental re-adjustment as you go through the book. Although two chapters by a German author largely relate to conditions and examples in Germany, don't be put off – they are probably the most interesting section of the book.
As a stranger to dynamic and photogrammetric monitoring, I am more drawn to surveying type monitoring techniques although in some cases this is more restrictive than photogrammetry. However, dynamic monitoring and photogrammetry are undoubtedly the methods of the future so these chapters will repay a very close study by civil and structural engineers.
Some of the photographs are dark and of indifferent quality; all are black and white. There are only a small number of diagrams, all of them graphs, although clear illustrative drawings and diagrams particularly in the earlier chapters would help explain the very complicated techniques involved. The general format of this hardback is satisfactory, the typeface is easily read and the layout is logical, but chapters 2, 3 and 4 need to be a lot lighter if readers are to have much chance of getting through them.
Monitoring and Assessment of Structures covers a vital subject and essential reading for the practising civil engineer and structural engineer. Anyone else will find the going in the earlier chapters far too heavy to keep their interest to the end.
Source
Construction Manager
Postscript
Before retiring, HS Stavely worked in private practice as a chartered building surveyor