Or, more directly: physical objects don’t care how we classify them. When I talk about structures here (or elsewhere) I try to classify them in a way that would be useful to a reader: a building has a frame or it has bearing walls, a bridge has a Pratt truss or it has a Howe …
I recently took a trip on the Metro-North Railroad and I had a few minutes to kill at Grand Central Terminal. I wandered into the new extension from the terminal to the west, created when One Vanderbilt Avenue was constructed, and found this sign. One Vanderbilt is now the tallest commercial building in midtown, so …
One of the earlier comparisons I made between comics and reality was the appearance of the front entrance to the Tombs in a Daredevil comic. We’re back at the same location, with Clint Barton (not dressed in his Hawkeye costume) leaving in a bad mood. Here’s reality, with a temporary wheelchair ramp: Note that the …
The caption on the top line adds the confusion of DC Comics starting to use real place names: if this part of a Batman comic is taking place in New York, what is Gotham City? In any case, in the main frame here there ae two reasonably-well known buildings: the building on the far left …
The New York City Department of Buildings has in recent years become very open with data, which makes my work and the work of everyone else in the field, easier. There are online databases that make it possible to find out quite a bit about buildings in the city. They are useful and visually bland …
