Seeing as how we’re north of 500 blog posts (as of May 2017), it’s probably too late for a Frequently Asked Questions post, but here it is anyway. This is the blog of Old Structures Engineering. Most of the posts are written by me (Don Friedman) but not all. Topics include pretty much anything touching …
I’ve talked before about “ruin porn” and my discomfort with the topic. I recently came across this seven-year-old essay on the topic: “The Unspeakable Pleasure of Ruins” by Rick Poynor. His thesis is that my misgivings are wrong, that there’s nothing wrong photos or other representations of ruins, regardless of the aesthetic intentions of the …
Yesterday, I mentioned mill-style architecture in Providence. Here’s an example. I suspect that the first floor is cast iron, but it could be steel with architectural sheathing. But buildings like this are, architecturally, all about the brick. As plain as this building is, there’s still a lot going on here. A short description of the …
I don’t know Providence well enough to talk about the character of the city. Like a lot of small cities in the northeast, it’s had to move from manufacturing to a service economy, a transition that has probably been eased by the presence of several large educational institutions. A good percentage of the buildings downtown …
There are long treatises on the topic of the aesthetics of the machine age, starting in the nineteenth century and working their way up to the present. That topic includes everything from the precisionists to steampunk. Great stuff, but not what I want to talk about. The machine-made mass production of architectural elements in the …
The deadline for submitting an abstract to the First Skyscrapers/Skyscraper Firsts symposium is coming up soon. Figuring out how skyscrapers came to be is a great topic and you are literally being invited to submit an abstract so that you can go argue with people about it.
