In some circles, “curtain wall” has become synonymous with “glass facade” but that’s not what it means. A curtain wall is simply a wall that does not carry structural load for the building as a whole. Saying that it does not carry any structural load would be wrong, as it carries its own weight (usually …
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 …
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 …
Given that every material fails eventually from exposure to the elements, one way or another, the big question is “how difficult is it to repair?” followed in second place by “how difficult is it to maintain?” To put it another way, if you spend enough time with old buildings, pictures of pristine new buildings are …
That’s a close-up of a street facade of an early 1920s New Law tenement. The brick pattern for the field of the wall has a good number of headers tying the pretty veneer brick to the unseen common-brick backup. I’m not sure if there are really headers in the narrow piers between windows, but it …
