Engineering

Talking History

by Don Friedman on March 30, 2013

I’ll be speaking at the Skyscraper Museum on May 15. The talk concerns the engineers and engineering developments of early skyscrapers that culminated in the construction of the Woolworth Building in 1913.

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Historic Structural Detail 4

March 5, 2013

Because technical language changes at a different rate than technology, we sometimes use obsolete words to describe new things and we sometimes use new words to describe old (or oldish) things. Case in point: people started referring to “curtain walls” in the  1890s, when the non-structural walls in question were 12 (or more) inches of [...]

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Talk at the Skyscraper Museum

April 9, 2012

I’ll be talking at the Skyscraper Museum (6:30 PM, April 24) on the history of structure in early skyscrapers. This is part of a lecture series in conjunction with the current exhibit on early skyscrapers and specifically the headquarters buildings of New York newspapers erected between 1870 and 1905.

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A Replacement Detail

April 5, 2012

We’ve shown a few old details that we like, but of course we also design new details to repair or replace the old. We’re still working on that large facade project, and our detail for a new outrigger system to support an upper-floor water-table has been installed. The spandrel beam is on the right, with [...]

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Preservation Engineering at Manhattan College

February 21, 2012

Preservation Engineering is being taught as a new course this semester at Manhattan College, as part of what we hope will become a masters degree program within the Civil Engineering department. Pat Morrissey (Conspec) recruited interested preservation professionals through a LinkedIn website to participate in establishing a course at his alma mater. After several meetings [...]

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Temporary Bracing

February 14, 2012

We are currently working on combining two brownstones to create one very large single family residential home on the Upper West Side. The buildings have landmarked facades which we will preserve while creating a new steel framed building within the existing facade. The existing party wall dividing the two lots will be removed to create [...]

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Talk, Down South

September 6, 2011

I’ll be speaking at the AIA-North Carolina conference this Thursday. The talk is on a topic of greg interest to me and close relation to our work: do designers learn lessons from the past. The specific topic I’m going to discuss is the relation of current facade-inspection laws such as New York’s Local Law 11 [...]

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Historic Structural Detail 3, Sort Of

August 22, 2011

Construction projects are full of changes and this was just as true in the past as it is now. In particular, where different trades’ and/or different designers’ work meets, there is a good chance that the as-built condition to not look like the drawings. Recently we’ve been looking at cornice supports at the building where [...]

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Scale

August 18, 2011

The world is not the same when examined at different sizes, a fact that has long been known. In order to see the asymmetrical nature of size, all one has to do is picture an elephant or an ant at the size of a dog and the adaptations to the true sizes of the creatures [...]

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Floor Vibrations

August 2, 2011

Engineering can sometimes be surprisingly precise. For example, if we know the size of a steel beam and the actual load that will be to be applied to that beam during an in situ load test, we can predict the amount of deflection under load to a few hundredths of an inch. In a case like this, [...]

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