Seeing as how we’re north of 1100 blog posts (as of March 2019), it’s probably too late for a Frequently Asked Questions post, but here it is anyway. This is the blog of Old Structures Engineering. Most of the posts are written by me (Don Friedman) but not all. Topics include pretty much anything touching …
“Buildings lost, forgotten, reimagined and transformed” by Shane Reiner-Roth is a nice short discussion of adaptive reuse and the alternatives. When a building’s original use – its original purpose – is gone, what happens next? It can fall into decay and eventually disappear or it can be reused. As I’ve said before, the best way …
I came across the carbon-emission maps at CoolClimate.org by accident yesterday, from a mention in Kate Wagner’s twitter feed. Ms. Wagner is best known for McMansion Hell, but has been branching out into other architectural and urbanism critique. The maps are fascinating for what they have to say about our assumptions and actually addressing carbon …
Part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, and part 5 give the context. Engineers create models. So do architects, economists, sociologists, physicists, biologists, and sculptors, among others. What makes our models special? Not every single structural engineering problem is life and death, but a large percentage of them carry the possibility of catastrophic failure if dealt with improperly. …
Modeling and Understanding, Part 6 and the End For Now Read More »
Part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4 give the context. Strength and stiffness are both easy to understand in a qualitative way, as how much load something can hold and how much it will move when it holds the load, but non-engineers tend to underestimate the amount of time engineers spend addressing stiffness issues. I find …
What is the purpose of having the floor numbers the same color as the background, particularly when the background is metal with a shine to it? It doesn’t matter what the lighting in the elevator is, the button signs are hard to read. The entire purpose of putting the floor numbers next to the buttons …
