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 …
I was in Williamsburg yesterday, because what better way to start a heat wave than a site visit at an unairconditioned building. In any case, that picture is the midtown skyline as seen from the Northside Williamsburg ferry dock. To give a sense of it, the East River here is about half a mile wide …
More on Wednesday’s topic… The concepts of embodied energy and embodied carbon don’t just affect how we look at new buildings, they can and should have a big influence on the question of whether to build or renovate. Simply put, it is possible, but not inevitable, that a focus on renovation rather than new construction …
About three years ago, I tried to describe some of the differences between expectations based on a rosy view of the future and realities based on…reality: The Star Trek Fallacies. Since that blog post, a new idea has come along that runs headlong into the fallacies about control, reliability, and repairability that I had described. …
They sound like buzzwords, but they’re serious: embodied energy and embodied carbon. It takes energy to produce structural materials, it generally releases carbon as well. So every piece of a building that we build has a physical cost in energy and released carbon as well as an economic cost. A good discussion of embodied carbon …
“‘We Cannot Save Everything’: A Historic Neighborhood Confronts Rising Seas” from yesterday’s Times hits a number of important points. Because of the history of settlement and travel in the US, a lot of old historic neighborhoods are near the ocean, bays, or sea-level portions of rivers. The buildings in those neighborhoods are increasingly vulnerable to …
