The Rational Use Of Structual Inner Space

Structure which acts as the skeleton of a building is one of the fundmental elements of the physical body of Architecture. It can be not only the tools of artistic conception, but also the fundation of building rationality. Nowadays, after the domination of postmodernism in the realm of architecture, Chinese architects began to pay more attention on the physical body of architecture. Also since the wide success of the Long Museum West Bund design and the exhibition of Archineering in China, sturcture become a hot spot among Chinese architects. A growing number of Essays appear to be focus on the integration of structure design and architecture design. However, none of those discussions cover the basic need of rationality.This research starts from clarifing the definition of structure and distinguishing the "inner space" from "covered space", and then, put forward three principles of structure rationality which should be considered together from early phase of design work. Based on these, we discuss how to set up proper "inner space" of structure to reach the goal of structure rationalization. At last, the research end up with the structure rationalization of a real project designed by Southeast university to test and verify the theory and find new ways of integrating structure design and architecture design.