Statics fundamentals applied to buildings, the dead, live, wind, seismic, snow, and rain load types, tributary areas and load takedown, the concept of an unbroken load path from roof to foundation, and an overview of common lateral structural systems.
Every structural calculation in this program ultimately reduces to statics — the equilibrium equations and free body diagrams this module opens with — applied to the load types a real building must resist: dead, live, wind, seismic, snow, and rain. From there this module works through tributary area (how a distributed load gets assigned to a specific member) and load takedown (how load accumulates level by level from roof to foundation), before arriving at the load path itself: the unbroken chain of connected elements every load, gravity or lateral, must travel through to reach the ground.
By the end of this module you should be able to explain why a load path is only as strong as its weakest single connection, and how moment frames, braced frames, shear walls, diaphragms, and trusses each represent a genuinely different structural trade-off rather than one being an upgrade of another — concepts Modules 5 through 8's material-specific design content each return to from their own side.