This announcement is like saying "buildings (large architectural structures) are actually moments of force, the cement or stone or wood or steel only exists to keep everything from collapsing in on itself.
This is actually kind of a beautiful sentence, especially the first half. I’m sharing it with some of my colleagues who research computational structural design/architecture/analysis as well as historical structural/civil engineering. I think some of them might agree with it, in a weird way. I will also be trying to get the main structures prof to squeeze this line in as a debate opener to one of his lectures for a class that is mixed between architecture and engineering students. FWIW the textbook used for that class is called “form and forces” so you can see how a sentence like that would fit well into the dialogue.
This observation is genuine enough, the moment of force is kind of like the quantum super-amplitude of forces, playing out very slowly on the classical scale. The experienced architect (or engineer) can "see" how a structure may future collapse by the intuition of reading moments of force and how they influence forms.
Get the form and forces textbook. It’s fantastic.
> I hope to some day build my own home. It may well be a tribute to brutalism, we'll see.
Don’t tell any architecture students this, they will rip you apart (just re-visiting their trauma upon you from when they were inevitably criticized for thinking “brutalism is cool” when they first got to arch school).
> The experienced architect (or engineer) can "see" how a structure may future collapse by the intuition of reading moments of force and how they influence forms.
Absolutely, any structures professor/lecturer worth their salt IMO should always be encouraging students to develop this ability. One excellent way to develop it is through the method of graphic statics (covered extensively in the aforementioned textbook) which was out of vogue for quite a while but has since started to gain some traction again as a pedagogical and design tool. The catenary is the oft-cited (and boring) example of a form-found structure.
Membrane and tension structures/the force density method would be another thing to check out in this realm.
I mean, I’m roughly familiar with the physical notion, but it doesn’t seem very suitable as an ontological bedrock.