Bare Structure

Another old photo, circa 1989. I wrote here some time ago about why I feel that the architectural design concept of “structural honesty” is, at the very least, misnamed. That said, there is an interesting discussion to be had about the intersection of structure and architectural design: so interesting that someone more knowledgable than me could fill a book on the topic. I just want to go over a few basic ideas.

The picture above would be barely comprehensible to a lot of people before, say, 1890. The floors are concrete, which was known as a kind of artificial stone, and the columns are too spindly to be anything other than iron or steel. At the time this picture was taken, there were no exterior walls on the building, which is where we can draw a line between modern understanding of structure and pre-modern. Despite the tree analogies, and heavy-timber-framed barns, and animal skeletons, people used to think of buildings as a bunch of masonry walls enclosing other stuff. If you look at building codes from before 1920, they begin with a lot of discussion about what size walls are needed for various building types and how those walls should be constructed. Seeing a metal frame without masonry walls or, more dramatically, a metal frame supporting masonry walls was unnerving to many people.

The line between structural elements and non-structural elements is a lot sharper than in used to be. The steel column at the center of the photo is structure; the fuzzy coat of spray-on fireproofing is not. If it were a masonry pier, the difference between the structure and the enclosure and the fireproofing would be zero.

There’s no end to new ideas. The wire-rope handrails to provide edge protection for workers were more than was required in 1900, were exactly what was required in 1989, and are considered inadequate today. Standards change, for protection, for structural design, for architectural design, and so on.

The absence of human scale and activity in a picture was once used for dramatic purposes, as in Piranesi’s Carceri. The modern aesthetic sensibility can turn this picture (and it was a simple work photo, with no artistic intent and no artistic merit) into a study in geometry with no moral overtones,

That’s four separate ideas spun off from a single photo of a steel-frame building under construction. The common theme, for me, among those four ideas is that the division of labor isn’t limited to human work. We’ve separated the structural, enclosure, architectural layout, fireproofing, conceptual load bearing, aspects of buildings from each other and from such issues as worker safety, and philosophy of aesthetics. Each item can be examined on its own merits and contribute in its own way, which is about as far from the blended aesthetics/construction/morality of the premodern era as one can get.