imperfection sensitivity.

They do not dwell

on the minutiae of computational techniques. Instead they have much to say
about special kinds of framework and how
to tackle them. Examples are large regular
frames, 'indeterminate' trusses, battened
columns and columns with shear, arches
and rings, tall frames, and the representation of regular frames as a continua. These
all provide useful insights into structural
behaviour not easily found elsewhere in
the literature.
The authors go on to deal quite extensively with thin-walled beams, plates and
shells, and elasto-plastic buckling of columns and frameworks. Yet, still, half the
book remains. It is this extra material that
sets it apart from lesser books on stability,
for it includes not only a comprehensive
examination of stability as a dynamic
phenomenon, and energy methods and
their offshoots (snap-back, catastrophes,
and so on), and the stability of inelastic
structures, but also some more specialized
topics.
One of these, creep-buckling, has been
of interest to aerostructures specialists
since the 1950s, when the effect of prolonged high temperatures on the performance of alloy compression members first
started to become important. As in most
studies of this kind the authors begin with
a comprehensive battery of springs and
dash pots arranged in various ways to
model the creep characteristics of the
material. While this may be necessary to
make the analysis tractable, one cannot
help feeling a little uneasy at the absence of
any connection between the mathematical
model and the molecular mechanisms on
which it is based. It is interesting to see
that much of this section of the book is
devoted to the practical question of how
the strength of concrete columns is
influenced by the aging of the concrete.
Another welcome addition to the usual
range of topics is a treatment of
instabilities in three-dimensional continua.
These are important for highly an isotropic
materials, for structures such as sandwich
or lattice columns (where shear deformations are important), and for structures in
which tangential stiffness is reduced by
plasticity or damage. This may seem a difficult way of approaching sandwich and
lattice columns, but the applications to
fibre-reinforced composites are interesting
and deserve further study.
It may be surprising to see fracture
treated in a book on stability, but the
authors have no hesitation in seeing it as a
stability problem, and this is in fact the title
of the penultimate chapter, which presents
a rich variety of information on crack
behaviour in different environments. The
final chapter is on the effects of damage or
localized softening behaviour and it is
perhaps here that the most esoteric subjects
are to be found, such as the behaviour of

348

a bar whose ends are moved simultaneously outwards at constant velocity.

The central idea here is the way in which
the localization of softening damage into a
small zone can produce bifurcations and
instabilities. For example, there is much
discussion of the load dflection and snapback characteristics of beams with softening hinges.
The authors waste no space on
unnecessary words, but the directness of
their approach makes much of the book
accessible to anyone with the requisite
background knowledge. The practising
engineer, confronted with an unusual practical problem, may find valuable insights
in the parts that deal with columns, plates,
shells and beams. Only the specialist will
appreciate the sections on creep-buckling,
fracture and damage, as well as the parts
that deal with methods and techniques. All
will profit from the way in which unusual
examples are used to illuminate unfamiliar
aspects of the subject-matter. These thousand pages represent an invaluable distillation of knowledge on all aspects of this
notoriously difficult subject and the book
will surely be treasured as a work of
reference for years to come.

H. G. Allen

An introduction to shell
structures: the art and science
of vaulting
Michele Melaragno
Van Nostrand Reinhold, New
York, 199 I, xiv + 4 2 8 page
(Chapman and Hall, UK,
543.50), ISBN 0-442-23725-1
The author is a professional engineer who
is also a professor of architecture (University of North Carolina). This book on the
art and science of shells is very strong on
art - and not so strong on science. The
'engineering' sections of the books are in
places barely adequate, in places irrelevant, and in places inaccurate. Further,
some of the most significant technical concepts receive scant or no treatment.
There can be no quarrel with the broad
sweep of the book, The first part deals with
wood and masonry domes, their origins
and symbolism, and their history from
ancient to Islamic, through Romanesque to
the present. An astonishing range of
examples is illustrated and described, but
without any unifying technical thread. For
example, the bulbous 'onion' domes of
Russia are well exposed, but there is no
discussion of the fact that a shell which
embraces more than a hemisphere cannot
be stable without tensile reinforcement (or
without cheating by not being a shell at all!
Professor Melaragno is clear, elsewhere in

Eng. Struct. 1992, Vol. 14, No 5

the book, that the dome of the Capitol in

Washington cheats by being not a shell, but
a cast-iron structure).
Theory, for the spherical shell, is first
introduced at about page 90; immediately
Professor Melaragno fails to distinguish
clearly between internal shell forces and
necessary edge supports. ('At the bottom
of a dome ... there is always a tension
force, which is usually absorbed by a tension ring at the base'. There are, in fact,
many ways of supporting a dome, and,
earlier, the author makes no comment on
the inclined drum of St Paul's, London,
although this is illustrated.) In the next
piece of simple analysis, that of the barrel
vault, the author reaches the wrong conclusions. 'The long barrel carries the
distributed load to the supports just as a
beam would . . . .
'As in a beam, the
longitudinal axial forces in the upper part
of the barrel are compressive, with those in
the lower part being tensile'. These
statements are not true; the longitudinal
forces are always compressive, and the
'free' lower edges of the barrel require
reinforcement with structural elements to
carry shear. Edges of shells are all important, and are hardly mentioned by the
author; as a final example, the Kresge
Auditorium at MIT is described without
any mention of its structural defects.
The author fails also to communicate any
deep nonmathematical understanding of
the behaviour of shells. For example,
'Gaudi's major accomplishment was the
development of the hyperbolic paraboloid'. This is curiously blinkered. Gaudy's
accomplishment was to take Robert
Hooke's powerful statement (1675): 'As
hangs the flexible line, so but inverted will
stand the rigid arch', and to develop this to
fantastic limits. Professor Melaragno of
course
knows
about
the
statical
equivalence of the hanging tensile cord and
the inverted compressive arch; but it was
Gaudi who photographed cords and sheets
in his studio, and turned the prints upside
down to give his monumental designs,
none of which are mentioned in the book.
And the author quotes Poleni (1748), but
seems oblivious of Poleni's brilliant use of
these ideas in his analysis of St Peter's,
Rome.
All of this leads to a lack of confidence
in the author as a guide to the understanding of shell action. On the other hand, the
descriptions of what can actually be done
in the twentieth century are good, with a
wide range of concrete and skeletal-steel
structures illustrated. The book ends with
46 virtually meaningless pages; reprinted
without commentary are titles and summaries of 237 publications on shells, as
noted in The Enineering Index for 1989.
Many of these papers are irrelevant to the
topics of the book.

J. Heyman