More events for a 100th birthday party:

• Gail Fenske’s talk on Cass Gilbert and Frank Woolworth.
• My talk on wind bracing and Gunvald Aus.
• The Medieval or Modern Symposium.

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.

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 solid masonry. Architects and engineers talked in the professional press about how thin and light those walls were – which they were compared to bearing walls of that era.

Old curtain walls often don’t seem very light to us, today, since we are used to a light wall being a glass wall. From a building we’re working on, the 1920s “light curtain wall” with a portion removed:

Where the pier has removed, the non-structural nature of the wall is made clear, both by the removal and the presence of the steel column directly behind…but that’s a heavy-looking curtain.

Here’s OSE’s very own Gabi Pardo, helping describe Grand Central for a Spanish news show on the terminal’s 100th anniversary:

Grand Central cumple 100 años.

One of our projects gets a little press: the conversion of a closed firehouse to a new home for the Brooklyn Philharmonic. The project has been delayed several times, but should be quite nice when completed.

It can be difficult to describe to people outside the field how bad some of the conditions we see actually are. The most difficult, in my opinion, is steel deterioration in old high-rises. The building owners and management (very often in our work, co-op and condo boards and their managing agents) aren’t out on the scaffold, may have seen some cracks in the masonry but certainly haven’t seen any rust, and haven’t experienced any signs of structural failure. If we don’t show them exactly how things are, they may not believe what we’re saying; but if we push too hard in talking about the damage, we may scare them into inappropriate action. So we try to educate as we investigate.

The connection on the right is shot, but hey the beam’s not so bad, right?

Uh…where’d the beam go?

The Institute for Classical Architecture & Art has announced its first group of design awards, and two projects that Old Structures collaborated on have won. Drumlin Hall is a large, classically styled private residence in the Hudson Valley designed by Peter Pennoyer Architects and completed in 2010. The Carnegie Hill apartment building is an addition and renovation of an old mansion, with the new work designed by Zivkovic Connolly Architects and John Simpson & Partners Ltd. We were the structural engineers for Drumlin Hall as well as working on the support of the new stone facade; we designed a new facade without expansion joints for the addition at the Carnegie Hill apartments, using a version of the cage construction idea popular in the 1890s.

The award ceremony will be held at the Racquet & Tennis Club, where we designed a facade restoration with Richard Rice Architects.

There’s some irony in a structural firm that performs forensic investigation of buildings being shut down by storm damage, but here we are. Our office is fine and the building is open again as of today, but our staff is stranded across the city without reliable transportation and the area surrounding our office is not in good shape.

We’l be open for business properly on Monday, November 5. We will try our best to respond to emails we receive before then.

Michael Lo joined Old Structures Engineering in August as an Associate. Michael has more than twenty years experience as a structural engineer, and has worked on new building, renovation and addition, and historic preservation projects. He worked with Marie at a previous job for most of the 1990s, and with both Marie and Don in 1991 and 1992.

Michael is a graduate of the Columbia University School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, is a certified LEED 2.0 Professional, and is a Professional Engineer in New York.

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.