That rather odd picture was taken inside a brewery that is housed in a nineteenth-century industrial building. The big shiny things are tanks where beer is a-brewing; the piece of wood between them is a post that supports part of the roof. The posts are closely spaced, which is how it can be so slender, …
I recently read “People Don’t Want Your Product Design. They Want the Outcome It Provides” by Christie Nicholson, and the title is a good synopsis of the essay. She uses several examples but two jump out at the reader. The first is McDonalds examining why people were ordering milkshakes at breakfast time, and the second …
The 1934 concrete-truss McMillin Bridge in Washington state. I’ve written a number of posts on the topic of incompatibilities between different aspects of buildings and they’ve mostly been about nuisances. This one is different and was triggered by my reading the OSHA report on the collapse of the FIU footbridge in Miami during its construction. …
In 2017, Old Structures began work on the engineering portion of the restoration of the Serbian Orthodox Cathedral of Saint Sava. The design team is headed by Don Zivkovic and Brian Connelly of Zivkovic Connelly Architects; Shaquana Lovell from OSE performed most of the structural design. The first step of any project is to figure …
The new West Thames Street Bridge is, in terms of design, something of an oddity. It’s a lenticular truss, and that’s a design that was never very common and hasn’t been used much in something over 100 years. I have no idea why the designers – WYX Architecture and Thornton-Tomasetti Engineers – choose this form, …
