I would go back to the 1870s and endlessly berate New York architects and builders for the next thirty years about their use of brownstone. Yes, it was cheap and very easy to carve. It’s been a plague on this city for 150 years. It’s been a plague in my work for 35 years and …
There is some rather extreme flooding going on in the Yellowstone River valley right now. To give a sense of it, the AP has reported the river cresting at 13.88 feet at Corwin Springs, Montana, while the previous record high water was 11.5 in 1918. I’ll admit that, while I read about the flooring this …
The vast majority of structures recorded by the Historic American Building Survey and the Historic American Engineering Record are distinguished by their design, by their history, or by both. Some are not, or rather by our standards today are not. I was mildly surprised to see the old West Side Highway had been photographed by …
A reader of this blog – not in engineering or a related field, so I’m keeping them anonymous unless they request otherwise – followed up on my post about the truss bridge that was destroyed by fire in 1890 in Oil City, Pennsylvania. I had provided several guesses about what caused the fire, but my …
This coming Tuesday, Tom Leslie and I will speak in the last of our paired lectures hosted virtually by the Skyscraper Museum. The first three lectures were on Foundations, Frames, and Facades, with Tom discussing developments in Chicago and me doing the same for New York. The last lecture is on Fire. As I’m getting …
