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A Clue!


I as going to straighten out that picture, taken on site while I was up a ladder with my hand holding the camera above my head inside a ceiling, but I decided that the unedited version has a certain cinéma-vérité feel to it.

The bottom of the picture is ceiling framing, as is the (sort of) vertical metallic-silver strip. Trapezes to support either some mechanicals or the ceiling are visible on the left and right. The interesting part, to me, is the center. The round column is supporting some kind of seat and there are double stiffeners going from the column to the underside of the plate. Above the plate is something very wide relative to the column. I knew the answer when I saw this, but let me pull out an old illustration:



Those are views of the front and side of a cast-iron column with a double I-beam girder on one plane axis and individual I-beam filler beams on the other plane axis. That double-stiffener bracket for the girder looks familiar. In this case, the column is large relative to the beam widths, but if the column were smaller and the beams larger that would look just like the photo above.

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