I’ll be giving two talks about preservation engineering in Virginia next month: April 7 in Richmond, and April 8 in Norfolk. If anyone reading wants to say hello or come for a full-day seminar, I’d be delighted to see you.
The two talks are at the gracious invitation of the Virginia Structural Engineers Council. Old Structures doesn’t pursue work in Virginia – a firm our size has to prioritize and we look for work closer to home – but we have consulted to other engineers and professionals on a few projects in Virginia over the years. There are regional differences in the built environment, partly based on the local vernacular architecture, partly based on local popularity of different architectural styles, partly based on local building tradition, and partly based on the local availability of various materials, but those differences can easily be overstated. The principles of preservation engineering are global and the details that depend on historical factors tend to be national. The price of steel in Virginia in 1900 was pretty close to the price of steel in New York at that time; the method used to rivet it was also the same in both states.
Unlike most of my talks, the audience here will be more or less all engineers. So I get to dive into some of the more technical details that I normal summarize when presenting to a mixed audience, and I can expect technical questions in the Q&A portions of the seminars. That’s always good for staying sharp.
