The postcard above, put out by the Detroit Publishing Company in 1906, shows Sewall’s Bridge over the York River in Maine. It’s more of a causeway than a bridge proper, consisting of a series of short-span wood girders supported by wood piles driven into the river bed. But the structural form is not why anyone …
Courtesy of Marvel Comics, that’s She-Hulk (in her more-ordinary Jen Walters form) and the Jack of Hearts (don’t ask) strolling over Bow Bridge in Central Park. Here’s a roughly similar view, from the 1984 HABS survey, before two rounds of restoration work (one of them OSE’s):
I have often defined modern structure in buildings as industrialized structure. The obsolete materials and systems we work on – cast-iron columns, wrought-iron beams, weird forms of reinforced concrete from 1910, and so on – are all based on industrial production. (I did once run into an engineer who thought that “wrought-iron beams” meant that …
Yet another obscure truss form that I had not heard of, coming at me from the HABS/HAER index: the Smith truss. The picture above is from Robert Smith’s 1867 patent and I’ll make this short: that’s a double Warren Truss. The connections are a bit odd, possibly reflecting Snith’s carpentry background, but the layout of …
That’s a picture from a probe, looking at the structure under a stair in an Upper East Side rowhouse-turned-apartment-house. The photo was taken on an angle – you try sticking your phone in a hole and shooting blind and see how you do – so the piece of wood that occupies most of the upper …
