Old Structures Engineering Blog
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Recognized as one of the leading consultancies in structural engineering for historic and old buildings, Old Structures Engineering (OSE) provides reports, drawings, and specifications that give detailed guidance to owners, designers, and contractors, enabling the preservation, restoration, and alteration of landmarked and other older structures.
Old Structures Engineering Blog
19h ago
From last fall, the corner of Christopher and Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village: The building we’re looking at, fronting on Bleecker, looks to be a slightly nicer than average Old Law tenement: it’s not a full dumbbell shape, but rather a T in plan, with the crossbar facing the street and the stem running back ..read more
Old Structures Engineering Blog
2d ago
I once gave a presentation called “Why hasn’t that fallen down yet?” It was about some of the differences between how structure used to be designed and the way it’s designed now, and how some things that look bad in old buildings are actually okay. This isn’t one of those. Behold, a butchered slab on ..read more
Old Structures Engineering Blog
3d ago
The 1889 Schermerhorn Building at Lafayette and Great Jones Streets: This commercial loft building is, unsurprisingly, a designated landmark and has been 1966, at the very beginning of landmarking in New York. The most noticeable architectural feature – I was going to write “most unique” but, whew, side-stepped that trap – are the ground-floor stone ..read more
Old Structures Engineering Blog
4d ago
Obviously, this blog is the main channel for OSE to communicate with the world in general. For some time, we have had a lot of people following the blog via LinkedIn (where posts are simultaneously, more or less, published) which sure seems like a good thing. Once upon a time, our blog posts were simultaneously ..read more
Old Structures Engineering Blog
5d ago
Daredevil and friends collect at City Hall to look for Mayor Wilson Fisk City Hall in 1900: The central-east portion of roof ..read more
Old Structures Engineering Blog
6d ago
I had two site visits yesterday. I went to both roofs, which were accessed through ladders. Classic, old style roof ladders like this random example I found: OSHA regulations basically outlawed this type of ladder in 1991. Those 1/4″ round rungs are not “corrugated, knurled, dimpled, coated with skid-resistant material, or otherwise treated to minimize ..read more
Old Structures Engineering Blog
1w ago
“Looking down upon a forest of skyscrapers: New York City”: The New York Public Library scrapbook has the date as 1850 to 1945. The Park Row Building in the foreground is 1899, but the most obvious latest possible early date is provided by the Sinclair Oil Building at 55 Liberty Street – the tall and ..read more
Old Structures Engineering Blog
1w ago
I was passing through West 36th Street last week and two buildings caught my eye. Both are old rowhouses that have been modified for commercial use at the lower floors and that survived the assembly of adjacent lots for larger buildings. As it happens, there are a number of new(ish) hotels on the block, all ..read more
Old Structures Engineering Blog
1w ago
Yesterday’s tale of woe hinged on the speed of change of a specific technology – personal-computer CAD – relative to the speed of my career. New technologies change rapidly as the people involved iterate cycles of experimentation, use, and business success or failure. AutoCad was a business winner in the 90s, Generic Cadd lost, but ..read more
Old Structures Engineering Blog
1w ago
Let me start with a mea cupla: had I properly archived the old drawings discussed below in 1996 none of the effort described would be necessary today. While there’s enough blame to go around – and in some ways, the problem is the result of blind circumstance and maybe no one’s fault – I can’t ..read more