In the real world, architects and engineers do a lot more than just calculate the adequacy of structural members: Starting from a blank sheet of paper, they design whole structural systems for buildings and bridges. This process involves selecting an appropriate material and structural system, laying out the system, detailing it, working out a construction process, and checking the adequacy of every part of the system with calculations.

Of these many steps in the design process, only the calculations have been taught at many schools of engineering and architecture. This has left students without any preparation whatever in the all-important parts of the design process in which the form of the structure is determined, the details are configured, and the construction is planned. It has also left many structures teachers, especially in architecture programs, as extraneous appendages to the departments in which they teach.

Shaping Structures: Statics teaches structural calculations in the context of the larger structural and architectural design process of which they are a part. Its emphasis, as its title suggests, is on finding good forms for structures, forms that are structurally efficient and appropriate to their use. It does so by using the fundamentals of statics to find forms for arches, hanging cables, cable-stayed structures, and trusses such that these structures experience only axial forces.

Thus students who are just beginning their study of structures find themselves generating designs for exciting long-span roofs and bridges. Even in the first chapter, in which students are introduced to the first equation of static equilibrium, they are conducted through the process of sizing and detailing hanger straps for a tall building. Several weeks later, they are not merely finding the forces in trusses, but learning as well how to change the forms of trusses to improve their efficiency.