A university campus is a loaded structure. Teaching, research and collaboration are applied to it, and the response is not distributed evenly. Some of the section carries almost the whole load. Some of it carries close to none. Which parts do which is decided at plan stage, not in operation.
Under pure bending, longitudinal fibres on one side of a cross section elongate while those on the other compress. Between them lies a surface along which normal stress and strain are zero. Its position is not arbitrary. It is fixed by the requirement that the resultant axial force from the stress distribution must vanish:
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