Can you tell the difference between a break and an architectural feature? What if the failure planes of the stone are so clean that they pretty much match the finished surfaces elsewhere? There’s no embedded metal. The cracks that led to that corner piece falling off and the cracks in the main water-table stone above are …
Last fall, the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat – known informally as “those skyscraper people” – issued a report on the statistics of tall-building construction in New York from 1900 onwards called “New York: The Ultimate Skyscraper Laboratory.” It’s interesting stuff and well worth the few minutes it takes to read. A few …
We are proud to announce that the restoration of the Sands Point Lighthouse – a project where we investigated and designed repairs to the structure working with Integrated Conservation Resources and Integrated Conservation Construction – has won a Preservation Award of the Society for the Preservation of Long Island Antiquities. It was a fun project, the …
The word “style” as applied to engineering is publicly anathema to most engineers: it conjures up the unfair stereotype of a fashionably-dressed architect making poor decisions about structural systems because those decisions will place a building within a particular aesthetic. Putting that image aside, engineering designers all have personal styles and there are stylistic trends in the profession …
One of the earliest challenges for structural engineers – long before the profession formally existed – was how to support masonry walls over openings. The tight column spacing of Greek and Egyptian temples, for example, was based in part on the limited spanning capacity of stone beams. Masonry arches, as used by the Romans, could span …
