Everyone seems to love covered bridges, but profile photos of them tend to be very boring: you’re looking at a plank wall. For most bridges, that’s one of the best angles. In any case, that’s the Bunker Hill Bridge over Lyle Creek, in Catawba County, North Carolina. And the inside view shows why I’m writing …
That odd round building in the photo above was the first time I encountered a structure that was a designed mix of wrought-iron and masonry. It’s the Gasholder House in Troy, New York. I was introduced to it when I was a student, not in an engineering class, but by a history professor, Tom Carroll. …
A picture is worth a thousand words, unless it isn’t. My early training was that every single piece of, for example, a connection had to be shown in a section and if that meant three or four sections for a single connection, then we drew three or four sections. (Language nit-picking clarification: all drawings are …
Continuing yesterday’s topic, here’s an example of the difficulty in extending the standard drafting language used for structural drawings. I’m going to draw on two sources – my possibly inaccurate memory of the standard line types at my first engineering job in the late 1980s, and release 2.1 of the A/E/C Graphics Standard of the …
I’ve been thinking about this topic a lot lately. There is a standard language for structural drawings – actually there are several, but that doesn’t really change the argument – and I’m wondering if we should drift from it a bit. The basics for structural drawings are framing plans everywhere, elevations where needed, and details …
