When I mentioned some of the odd columns designs that used to be allowed, I said that I had seen examples of all of them. As it happens, I saw another example yesterday and it seemed worth discussing. The badly-framed picture above shows a probe at a round concrete column in a circa 1910 industrial …
Yesterday I talked about the difficulty of fitting a code from one era to a building from another. A bit of creative interpretation may be necessary since some of the governing assumptions of the document may be wrong. The reverse effect can also be true, where a literal reading of current code has a different …
The page above was added to the library scan of a 1924 code. (I assume it was added to any number of old codes, but I only saw it in the one document.) In one sense, that statement is straightforward and means exactly what it says: anyone designing a new structure should be using the …
I might as well continue the parallelism between the Singer and Woolworth Buildings that I started yesterday. The Woolworth building has a fairly complicated wind-bracing system, which is in part a reflection of the very different conditions in the top 30 stores (the “tower”) and the bottom 30 stories (“the base.”) The tower is slender …
At my first engineering job, there was a phrase I came to hate: “Let’s sharpen our pencils.” It was intended to mean “if we redo these calculations more precisely, the numbers we get may be closer to our goal.” In practice, it meant a lot of work for me (since our work was done using …
