I’ve been seeing quite a few articles recently on how Covid-19 will affect architecture, on what lessons we all will learn from this (obviously still on-going) experience. For example, “How Architecture Could Help Us Adapt to the Pandemic” by Kim Tingley; “Blue-sky thinking: how cities can keep air clean after coronavirus” by Jonathan Watts; and …
Since the full heat of summer is now here, and we’re in the traditionally slow week heading into the July 4th holiday, I’m going to spend some time looking, with an engineering perspective of course, at some of the strangeness constructed along the beaches. Not this kind of strangeness, though: No one was going to …
Construction History: Summer At The Beach, Part 1 Read More »
In the spirit of Marie’s post this morning, a story that is less heartwarming and less directly concerned with engineering, but is, like hers, decades in the making. In the summer of 1986, I had a month of enforced quiet following a minor operation. I assembled that cardboard model of the Chrysler Building during that …
I was fortunate enough to visit a childhood friend’s 1898 family summer home in New York state over the weekend, a place where I had often gone as a child. Now as an adult, when I look around the garden and the house, I see things through the lens of a structural engineer. I decided …
The building with the ornate stone facade is 114 Liberty Street, an early 1900s loft building later converted to condos. The photo looks a bit odd because the building immediate to the east has been demolished, and I was standing almost directly opposite the lot line. The building has a metal frame – some of …
