This book serves as a background for students in Structural and Civil Engineering. Since the available hours for teaching Steel Structures and particularly Tubular Structures vary from country to country, this book has been written in a modular form. To cover the needs in the various countries, a committee was established to review the material. Although the material is mainly based on the Eurocodes, the setup makes it easy to change the lectures and relate them to other (national) codes.

Design is an interactive process between the functional and architectural requirements and the strength and fabrication aspects. In a good design, all these aspects have to be considered in a balanced way. Due to the special features of hollow sections and their connections it is even here of more importance than for steel structures of open sections. The designer should therefore be aware of the various aspects of hollow sections, as basically described in this book.

You will navigate from text to the explanatory figures or tables just by clicking on their references and viceversa.

This book describes the possibilities of architectural design of tubular structures, from the point of view of Mick Eekhout, who has acquired great experience as an independent architect in Delft and who has now turned entirely toward the development, manufacture and the realisation of three dimensional structures for buildings and architecture, in the setting of his Octatube Company in Delft. His specific concepts for spatial structures and glazed structures are applied all over the world. From his point of view, there must be continuous interaction between manufacturer, assembly / installation and calculation / conception.

Structural systems and the perfection of details await the initiatives of the technical architect to carry the state of the tubular structure art towards the highest levels and to accomplish a exciting integration in architecture.

CIDECT has stimulated and sustained the writing of this book from which extends the panoramic vision of professor Eekhout who has the chair of Product Development at the faculty of Architecture of the University of Technology of Delft. The author brilliantly moves our attention from pure technology towards a subtle combination between architecture and construction technique.