Solid Footing for General Structures Seminar

by Jeff LeMay IA.AIBC

The recent ARE General Structures workshop featuring David Thaddeus, AIA, NCARB, provided an excellent overview of structural concepts and solid preparation for the ARE General Structures exam. The 3-day workshop hosted by the AIBC in Vancouver November 7th -9th was attended by 27 intern architects from B.C., Washington, and as far away as California.

David Thaddeus’s amicable and engaging communication style made the three full days in seminar not only bearable but often enjoyable.

David’s extensive collection of 2D models made for the overhead projector clearly depicted the transformations that occur in structures under various loading conditions. His use of colour coding for different types of forces in his digital presentation was consistent throughout the seminar and made note taking and review easy. David never hesitated to pause for questions and confirm we were all on track eliminating our anxiety over being left behind.

David’s presentation was a thoughtful balance of structural concepts, equations and example questions from the exam. The concepts presented formed a useful review of the structures courses taken in school, but David presented them in a way that made them accessible for interns with or without a structures-heavy education. These concepts were underscored by a slide show including images of innovative design solutions and arresting structural failures.

The equations David presented served to consistently and cogently underscore the concepts. Eemphasis was placed one those most often featured in the exam. David successfully straddled the line between the 3.1 and 4.0 exams, ensuring a useful seminar for interns on both exam tracks. Significant time was allotted for practice questions. David also offered useful time saving strategies such as eliminating impossible answers from multiple choice questions and thereby avoiding unnecessary math operations.

This engaging and useful seminar is a recommended event not only to interns studying for General Structures but also to those who wish to enhance their structural knowledge for use in practice.

Testimony from Abdel Amin IA.AIBC:

"The things I found useful were the techniques Thaddeus presented to save time and eliminate needing to calculate every math question. He offered an exam taking plan of attack which I thought eliminated the need to ‘think’ during the exam and tempt misinterpretations. He made it simple and quick so you weren’t prone to confuse terms, especially when the equations were involved. I also felt that he explained the concepts more clearly where the Kaplan Study Guide was unnecessarily math heavy and light on explanations. He explained the theories better and we were better equipped to do the exam because of that. There isn’t too many calculations in that exam compared to the theory so if you don’t have the theory down, you may have trouble with the majority of the questions.

Also, the 2D structural models that he had were very useful. You can see clear as daylight what happens when forces act on the systems that are under consideration. I need to see it to believe it. You can talk for hours but if I can’t see it/ visualize it I won’t believe it and it becomes much harder for me to even remember it for the exam. I don’t think I am alone in thinking like this.

If I were to do all this again, I would schedule the Thaddeus course to be 2 weeks before my exam. I feel you need to do some studying before to get the most out of the course but leave yourself enough time to be able to read and review new concepts that you weren’t aware of after the course. I ran out of that time and had to wing it as much as I could as it was eating into my review time. I scheduled the exam for the Friday after the course so I ran out of time to thoroughly review the additional readings that he recommended.

The money for the course is well worth it. For the amount of time that you are there, a total of almost 30 hrs I think, it works out to be around $10/hr. Less than half of what you would spend on a tutor or another course which isn’t catered to passing the ARE specifically."

The Intern Architect Committee will be arranging for Prof. Thaddeus’ return for 2009. Stay tuned for further details.