Safety, Science and “Buildings With Feelings”
 If Dr. Ian Smith had been working with the three little pigs, chances are the pig in the wooden house wouldn't have ended up as pork chops. And Dr. Smith, who's building Canada's first experimental “feeling” building wired with force-sensing devices, has a message for today's builders to keep the allegorical wolf away: add science to the art of building construction.
“In Canada, we used to design houses entirely based on past experience, but we're moving away from that because people today are much more interested in having signature-style buildings with more complicated shapes, like large openings for garages and patio doors. That's where experience just breaks down. So, now you're tending to have engineering input even with small buildings,” says Smith, a professor of timber engineering at the University of New Brunswick (UNB).
This month, in Nashville, Tennessee, he received the 2002 American Society for Civil Engineers' James R. Croes Medal for work to improve the design of wooden structures.
Smith says that many modern Canadian wooden buildings – from suburban homes to low-rise offices – would be in “distress” in an earthquake or severe wind. This is because architects and builders don't always fully understand the behaviour of materials (especially glued wood products, such as strand board and engineered timbers) and joints, in these newer, complex configurations.
“With any kind of building, failures occur when you extrapolate too far,” says Dr. Smith who came from his native England in 1986 to take up Canada's first dedicated timber engineering position at UNB.
 Dr. Smith and a UNB team of about 20 other professors, postdoctoral and graduate students are working to provide the scientific foundation on which to build safer, longer-lasting contemporary wooden buildings. Dr. Smith's focus is on integrating the understanding of failures in wooden buildings from the microscopic scale to that of the entire structure, with an emphasis on the joints, whether nailed, bolted or held together with plates.
“It's the connections that make everything else work,” says Dr. Smith.
He's presently leading the construction of Canada's first experimental “feeling” building. It's wired throughout with devices that measure pressure and deformation and that accurately record how forces such as wind and floor weight spread through a building from the roof joists to the foundation.
The information gained will be used to fine tune the computational and mathematical techniques designers and engineers use to create safer buildings, and to update building code regulations.
“This scientific approach is necessary because modern wooden buildings are just too complex for an intuitive, rule-of-thumb understanding,” says Dr. Smith, the author of the world's first scientific book on fracture and fatigue in wood, published earlier this year.
Contact:
Dr. Ian Smith
Tel.: (506) 453-4944
E-mail: ismith@unb.ca
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