A 5-story steel-framed office building case study — composite floor framing with a worked shear-stud calculation, wind vs. seismic base shear, chevron braced-frame design against AISC 341 slenderness limits, spread footing sizing, and MEP coordination.
The project brief: a developer needs a 5-story, 120 ft x 80 ft steel office building on a moderate-seismic site, using composite floor framing for gravity and steel braced frames for lateral resistance. This is the program's first project where wind and seismic are both real, competing loads, and where a fixed floor-to-floor height becomes a governing MEP coordination constraint.
This module walks the whole design the way a practicing structural engineer would: a composite beam and shear stud calculation, a side-by-side wind vs. seismic base shear comparison showing which one governs and why that matters for detailing, chevron brace sizing against AISC 341's ductility slenderness limit, the unbalanced-load check at the chevron beam, and an interior column's spread footing design. The full worked numbers, complete bill of materials, and finished design reasoning are part of the unlocked module below.