Modern Steel is written by the structural steel industry for the structural steel industry. We encourage bylined feature articles in the form of practical technical advice, project-related stories, and other ideas that are relevant to our readers. The chosen topic should be discussed in terms of how it relates to the structural steel design, detailing, fabrication, and/or erection communities. Examples of past articles are available in our archives section. All contributions will be edited.
Technical articles should offer explanations, discussions, or practical “how-to” information. If you’re passionate about a technical topic or have an area of expertise you’d like to share, we welcome your wisdom!
Project articles should showcase at least one of these six attributes that set steel apart from other structural materials on the market (read more about them here). Pick one and show how your project exemplifies it.
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Adaptability. Steel’s durability and adaptability can assist you in reinventing a structure for an unanticipated modification or new use. Did your project take an existing structure and easily adapt and reuse it?
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Cost. Did steel lower costs on your project? Did bringing a fabricator onto the project team early help save? How did steel’s off-site fabrication streamline your project timeline?
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Quality. Did structural steel’s robust quality certification program prevent errors instead of correcting them?
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Resilience. Was your project designed with resiliency top of mind because of its location’s susceptibility to natural disasters or extreme weather events? Why was steel the choice for achieving resiliency?
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Speed. From start to finish, you can design, fabricate, and construct a steel building 50% faster now than you could just a few years ago. Did fabrication or steel erection help shave time off the schedule?
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Sustainability. All structural hot-rolled sections produced in the U.S. are made in electric arc furnaces, and American structural steel is 92% recycled on average and 100% recyclable. Was sustainability a priority from the beginning, and if so, how did it influence the design and material choices?
These design principles will help you tell your project’s story. We’re aiming to highlight a unique element of the project’s structural design and how/why steel was an ideal choice to achieve it. That could be a site constraint that steel helped solve, a part of the program that steel best achieved, a steel building fit for reuse, or a structure type that’s often built with concrete but was successfully done with steel. We aren’t looking for an “information dump” with a scattered assortment of project details grouped into one article.
To help you pick one of those six points, consider these questions:
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What is the takeaway for the readers? What can they learn from your article?
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Identify the greatest architectural, engineering, fabrication, and erection challenges for the project. What were the solutions? How were they implemented?
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What was the most interesting thing about the project? What made it unique from a structural steel standpoint?
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How did choosing steel impact the schedule or improve the constructability of the project?
Submissions should be between 1,000 and 1,500 words, though the latter is not a hard cap. Please also submit images that help tell your story--construction shots, finished photography, close-ups of finished steel elements, connection/detail drawings, 3D models, floor plans, and renderings. Images should be 300 dpi or higher and sent as individual files, though you may also embed them in the text to show ideal placement within the article. Please also include photo credits for each and complete our image release form.
All article materials should be sent to Modern Steel Construction associate editor Patrick Engel, [email protected].