Structural Action Again, Uninterrupted

Marie is working (with Tom Fenniman) on the Old Field Point Light – a lighthouse in, you guessed it, the town of Old Field, New York. It’s among the older lighthouses we’ve worked on, with the base building over two hundred years old. (The light itself is newer…more on that in a future post.) Marie took this picture on a recent site visit: As Marie noted (when she posted the picture on our internal “Beautiful Buildings” Slack channel) the arched window and door lintels are each a single piece of solid stone. The door and window jambs also appear to be single pieces of stone. The stone is sandstone from Connecticut, which is tougher and harder than the brownstone that is the most commonly-used sandstone in the area. So…how do those lintels work? Important starting note: they actually work how they work, and we don’t know the exact state of stress in the masonry. All of our models are just that – models – and are simplifications of reality based on assumptions, not reality itself. They…