Chapter 1: Empirical design in structural engineering

Empirical design is design by experience that is applied by using past successes directly as a basis for later designs. The experience may be direct personal experience on the part of the designer, or it may be collective experience of previous designers, often distilled into simple rules. Empirical design is an effective means of establishing the initial premises of a design and determining materials, configuration, size and spacing of the components of a structural design. The effectiveness of empirical design is simply that it is using proved procedures to achieve a favourable result in the design of a building structure: a structure that achieves the purpose of resisting applied loads, is an effective complement to the architecture of the building and is of reasonable dimensions.