In Retrospect, A Bad Idea

That’s the last of my Portland pictures and it’s another case of old-fashioned modernity, only this one is a not benign. This very solid-looking masonry building has a few hints of metal framing but it does not fully embrace the revolution that was happening. For example, the facade is four bays wide, obviously so at the ground floor and somewhat less obviously above. There are enlarged piers that run the full height of the facade at the ends, leading to large ashlar piers at the ground-floor corners. There are similar piers one bay in from each end, leading to ground-floor piers between the end bays and the interior bays.

The center pier doesn’t exist. Maybe I’ve spent too much time looking at Beaux Arts style facades, but this absence seems weird. The ground floor has another big pier ready to carry load from above, but what’s above is a bunch of windows. Most likely the facade load simply travels through the flat wall on either side of the centerline windows down to the lintels over the storefronts at the interior bays; there is probably some kind of spandrel beam in the plane of the wall at the projecting bay windows at the third floor.

But that’s not what caught my eye. The masonry wall sits on exposed metal lintels at the four bays of storefront. The lintels are obviously made of multiple steel or wrought iron shapes, as the ends of bolts used for spacers are visible.

The distance from flange tip to web face is quiet small, suggesting channels or I-beams; my experience with similar lintel suggests that these are double or triple I-beams. The spacers may be fancy cast-iron contraptions or they may be as simple as sections of pipe bearing against the beam webs and secured with a bolt passing through the webs and pipes. The outer ends of the bolts have decorative washers. The presence of those decorative washers suggests that the original architectural design included having the beams exposed. This might have been done because it would be difficult and expensive to wrap the beams in masonry, or it might have been done to show off the beams. “Look! We’re using this new technology to allow us to have big glass storefronts!”

Having the lintels exposed like this means that a severe fire on the ground floor would likely cause a wall collapse: even if the beams weren’t heated enough to weaken, they would expand from the heat and start pushing on the masonry. This building – and the many transitional iron and steel building like it – use part of a technological system (the beams) but ignore the rest (the masonry fireproofing), which is a good way to have a disaster.