High-Visibility Low-Visibility

I’ve mentioned before that our work is usually invisible in completed projects. With a few exceptions you generally can’t even see the portions of a project building that were our responsibility because what you’re seeing is the architectural design work that we enabled but not create. The project I’m mentioning below is typical in that our work is invisible to just about everyone, but it’s not typical in the sense that the final result is being seen by literally millions of people. Between 2016 and 2021, we were the structural engineers on a team converting a five-building complex on Columbia Heights, the westernmost street at the top of the bluff above the East River that gives Brooklyn Heights its name. The buildings had industrial origins: three were late-1800s warehouses that had served the docks adjacent to Furman Street (at the bottom of the bluff), the largest two were 1920s concrete-frame factories. All five had been used as offices from the late 1970s onward, but that…