Teach Yourself to Build

Remember grade-school workbooks where you completed the problems and exercises right on the page? Teach Yourself to Buildis a more sophisticated sort of workbook that quickly and directly involves the student or do-it-yourselfer in designing the architectural forms of simple buildings in various materials. It allows readers simultaneously to select appropriate structural systems, lay out structural plans, choose finish materials, develop construction details, and in general to perform many of the major design tasks necessary to make the building a reality. Beginning with a simple lesson on drawing freehand to scale, Teach Yourself to Buildpresents some basic criteria for deciding on a structural system, outlines a simple procedure for laying out framing, gives worked examples of stair, dimensional, and board footage calculations, and teaches the rationale of concrete framing systems, steel connections, and masonry spanning devices. With the help of these instructions, the student is soon designing a steel-frame office tower, a wood-frame retail establishment, an all-brick house, a classroom building of reinforced concrete, and a large museum of fire-resistant construction. Teach Yourself to Buildcontains exercises in all the major systems of construction-wood, masonry, steel, and concrete. These cover dozens of skills which are indispensible to the designer, from choosing a structural system to working with major building code provisions. Naturally, this workbook should be accompanied in its use by standard reference books on construction; however, it gives information on many topics which are not covered elsewhere in print. Entirely handwritten and illustrated by the authors, the exercises in Teach Yourself to Buildhave been used and tested in classrooms and studios at MIT. The student edition of the book is perforated and punched so that pages can be removed for grading and reassembled in a standard three-ring binder, while the other edition has a regular paperback binding suitable for reference and self-instruction.