Old Structures Engineering

I will be in Indianapolis next week for the annual conference of the Association for Preservation Technology International. It’s a little strange in that this is the first APT conference in about ten years where I don’t have any specific role to play. I’ll explore Indy a bit, I guess.

From 1904, a postcard[1] sent from New York to St. Louis. Starting with the back side:

I can’t make out that name at all, although whoever he[2] was, he appears to have been an “esquire”. Secretary of the Swedish…something…at the

I was minding my own business in Noho when this building forced me to look at it:

Completed in 1883, it was not actually the Mercantile Exchange, which was about a mile away, but apparently was back-office and sales space for the exchange. Physically, it’s a...

Yet another trip down a rabbit hole courtesy of a random trip to a National Park Service web page: 1906 Earthquake Cottages. Just a reminder: as awful as that earthquake was, a lot of the worst damage to smaller buildings – wood-framed houses, for example – ca...

When I started my research into old skyscrapers, I faced a chicken-and-egg problem. What is a skyscraper? is one of the questions that I was attempting to answer with data about the physical structure of actual buildings, but I didn’t have that data when I started, as that was the point of the research. The only way to deal with a knot like that is to make a decision...