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Material behavior can be idealized as consisting of an 'elastic' domain and a 'plastic' domain. For almost 200 years, structural design has been based on an elastic theory which assumes that structures display a linear response throughout their loading history, ignoring the post-yielding stage of behavior. Current design practice for reinforced concrete structures is a curious blend of elastic analysis to compute forces and moments, plasticity theory to proportion cross-sections for the moment and axial, load, and empirical mumbo-jumbo to proportion members for shear. From the book "Design of Concrete Structures with Stress Fields" by A. Muttoni, J. Schwartz and B.Thurliman.