One of the things that separates engineering from theoretical science is the never-ending presence of design criteria that are not directly related to the problem at hand. I once had a small job (supporting new ventilation equipment in a hospital) balloon into a medium-sized one because the best (using engineering criteria) design choice of installing …
A reasonably pretty picture – I wasn’t trying for artistic effect, but I feel like I may accidentally achieved some – of a nasty situation. The exposed face brick is pretty much dead, since the outer hard skin of the bricks is gone, leaving the soft chewy centers exposed. When this condition was first exposed …
The picture above, from the HABS survey of downtown Providence, Rhode Island, is a litmus test. Is the first thing that you thought of when you looked at it “trash can”? Was that the tenth thing you thought of? I have a small amount of familiarity with downtown Providence, but that’s not why I looked …
Building history is very local, and I don’t know enough about Boston’s history to say much about this ghost. I’d guess it was a house or a house-sized commercial building; given that we have scars of both a flat roof and a gable, it was probably altered at some point. Or maybe this is a …
Tim Michiels took the picture above about a year ago, showing pieces of four tenements. It’s the pair in the middle that interest me, as they were obviously built at the same time but they’re not exactly the same. Given the average length of one of my blog posts, this picture is worth about five …
