A Weakness Masquerading As Strength

A view of the ground floor os a small industrial building in the Bronx: The building has no cellar, so this is its bottom. The interesting thing here is the design of the column bases, but I’ll get to that in a minute. The floors are wood joists in two bays: spanning between the side walls on the left and right and a line of steel girders down the middle; the columns support the girders. (You can see one of the girder, painted green, just to the left of the big red pipe.) So, if we engage in some categorization, this is a bearing-wall building with some interior steel framing. Those trapezoidal plates and the projecting T-shaped brackets at the bottom of the columns look like they are there to transfer moment from the columns to the (hidden) footings. They’re not there, for example, just to keep the columns upright during the 1910s construction: steel material used to be much more expensive, relatively, than steel-workers’ labor, so temporary and re-useable bracing would have been…