232 pages
8 1/4 x 10 5/8 inches
200 color illustrations
ISBN 978-1-58093-187-8
$50 hardcover
($60 Canada
£30 UK)
World rights

Support & Resist
Structural Engineers and Design Innovation
Nina Rappaport

As architectural projects have become increasingly complex, as materials have become more dynamic, as the computer has become a widespread tool, the collaborative partnership of architects and structural engineers has gained prominence. Many of the major structures of the early twenty-first century would have been inconceivable without the engineer's ingenuity and design intuition.

Support and Resist features profiles of fourteen innovative international engineers and over thirty building case studies. By foregrounding structure as an integrated aspect of design, the book emphasizes work of those engineers who are involved at the outset of a design project. These creative engineers are shifting the design focus to structures, thus inspiring a new culture of engineering. Today integration of design and structure moves beyond efficiency and economy of form, enabling a new shaping of space. Engineers are not just calculating stresses and following existing codes, but designing structures that relate to building performance with a new freedom in form-finding that often leads to unexplored physical territories.

Support and Resist presents investigations of structures, with firm profiles, and over two hundred images: sketches, technical drawings, and rarely published construction photographs, as well as striking views of completed projects.

Nina Rappaport is an architectural critic, curator, and educator. She is the director of publications at Yale School of Architecture, and editor of the biannual publication Constructs, and the school's studio book series including CAC: Contemporary Art Center, Zaha Hadid Studio 2000, The Millennium House, and the Bass Studio series. She was a fellow of the Design Trust for Public Space in New York and has received grants from New York Council on the Arts and the Graham Foundation for the Advancement of the Fine Arts.