How much weight can a handful of bamboo sticks hold?
A lot more than you’d think.
During the spring Arch 232 Studio: Structural Fundamentals, Architecture students put their designs to the ultimate test by building delicate-looking trusses out of bamboo skewers and then loading them up until they snap. The result? A mix of suspense, crashes, and celebration as structures weighing less than a pound manage to hold hundreds of pounds.
It’s all part of a hands-on lesson in structural design, where creativity meets physics and failure is just part of the process.
Read the full story by professor Marci Uihlein in the Illinois News Bureau to see how these tiny trusses deliver some seriously big results: Designing, building and breaking things.
A video of the trusses event can also be found on FAA’s Instagram.
