Angol
It is well known that people learn from failure much more than from success. It is to the credit of structural engineering profession that failures have been and continue to be used to improve design, construction and regulatory practices. We do not just pay up, rebuild and walk away - we delve, we learn, and we improve. The first part of this book presents a collection of cases of building structural failures with the emphasis on the process and substance of the resulting code modifications. The second part presents the design of a single-story steel building in accordance with two of the widely used steel design specifications for buildings, the American and the European ones. The purpose of this paper is to compare them, looking at the more relevant differences in the design computation between the two, at which one is more economical (less demanding) in terms of amount/weight of steel required, and the differences and costs in the serviceability limits states for the deflections requirements.
