Statics and Strength of Materials

Where physics meets the building: this is the course that teaches you why structures stand up, and what happens inside the columns and beams when they do. You'll spend the term drawing free body diagrams, working through shear and moment diagrams for trusses, arches and cables, and translating loads into stresses and deformations — capped by a small structural project where you actually build and test a model. It's the bridge between the abstract physics you've seen and the studio decisions you'll defend later, and most upper-year structures and construction courses assume you left here fluent in FBDs and able to read a beam's internal forces on sight.