That picture is looking up at the underside of a floor in an old warehouse. The walls are solid brick, and the floors are concrete vaults supported by steel beams.
The last beam supporting a vault is a channel that runs into the face of the pier just past the window, where it is supported by the big girder (above the left-right portion of the pipe).This leaves a 9 or 10 inch space between the inside face of the wall and the channel, and that space is filled with a brick corbel coming off the wall.
The last time I pointed to a corbel detail like this, it was in a heavy-timber building and was specifically used to prevent hot gas from rising from one floor to the next during a fire. It’s less clear what’s going on here. A few possibilities:
- Since there’s no way to cantilever a portion of concrete vault past the last beam, the corbel was used to close off the opening in the floor. But then why not shift the last beam so that it’s tight to the wall?
- The building was constructed as heavy timber and later upgraded to steel and concrete, and the corbel is a carry-over.
- The building was planned as heavy timber and switched during construction to steel and concrete, with the corbels already built.
There are probably more possibilities that don’t occur to me just now. And, as usual, it’s unlikely that I’ll ever know the answer.
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