Advice From Long Ago

From a 1915 book titled Engineering Office Systems and Methods, some thoughts on how to design a steel-frame building: My thoughts on the thoughts: No one today would attempt to write a single book that covered every possible topic for a consulting engineering company from the design requirements for a half-dozen building types to how to manage the office budget. One could argue that the world is more complicated now than then, but I’m not really sure how true that is. We have a lot of tools that simplify things – emailing PDFs rather than worrying about a half-dozen different types of postage for letters and parcels, for example – that would have sounded like science-fiction in 1915. This was still in general the age of built-up members for anything heavier than an I-beam, which is why the column cross section will be “as influenced by details of beam and girder connections.” If you’re planning on using cross-bracing for lateral load, and therefore in general only need simple…