The picture above isn’t one of our projects. It’s a couple of steel-framed loft buildings across the street from where I was working on one of our projects. You can just make out the narrow gap between them on the left; the building on the right seems to be getting brick and terra cotta replacement. …
First, the handsome fellow in the picture above is Mark Hipwell, who graciously took time off from his packed schedule – he’s an engineer, and a foodie, and an artist, and an ambassador for his home city – to show me around Birmingham last week. The Birmingham building behind him has a construction date of …
I discussed inverted-arch foundations a while back and wanted to briefly return to the topic with this picture. That’s a beautiful example of an inverted arch, carrying the load from two piers in a church apse. The most important thing about it is that it has performed its job properly for over one hundred years. …
That picture was taken in a theater attic. The diagonals on the upper right are portions of the timber-framed roof; the wall separates the auditorium area from the lobby. It’s the thing embedded in the wall that is rare and odd. In short, that’s the end of a long-span steel truss (over the auditorium, on …
Yesterday’s picture of the St. Paul Building (repeated above) had an interesting detail in the background. The problem of how tall a chimney should be has been around ever since people started building cities: it has to be tall enough so that smoke (and potentially burning cinders) don’t blow onto a neighbor’s roof or into …
