A Traditional View

That’s a view up Trinity Place from Rector Street, looking past the construction of the new 74 Trinity Place on the left. The building on the far left is 2 Rector Street; the building past the construction is the old – currently empty – American Stock Exchange.

If you click on the photo to enlarge it, you see seven columns across the east edge of the construction, with beams erected as far as the future third floor. Each column top has splice plates that are ready for the next shaft of column going up to be erected. There are some hangers and partial-bay beams at the second floor level that are a bit difficult to figure out right now; they probably relate to a fancy entrance that will be constructed later.

There’s nothing remarkable about that brand-new steel frame and that is what I want to talk about. Pretty much everything we can see of that frame would have looked familiar to big-building designers and builders in 1900. They were riveting their frames, but they certainly were familiar with bolts. They were using built-up columns and sometimes built-up girders, but they also had large beams. They were erecting their columns in two-story lengths for convenience. The basics haven’t changed because they work: the group of interconnected technologies that we collect as “steel skeleton framing” were then a new technology and are now a mature technology, but they are essentially the same because there has been little need to change them. A useful definition, perhaps, of a mature technology is that it no longer undergoes rapid major changes, and that’s where steel frames are.