I’m back from a short trip to Boston and will be posting a few images from there. This is a renovation project that we walked past and which caught my eye: the work looks reasonably complicated, the building is interesting architecturally and structurally, and there’s a lot going on in that one shot.
The building appears to have a steel skeleton frame – the exterior-wall columns are obviously steel, the interior columns have round enclosures but appear to also be steel, and the front facade is, rather obviously, supported on the frame at the second floor. The round enclosures on interior steel columns are something you see on a lot of building constructed 1890-1910. It’s true that classical columns were usually round (although there were certainly rectangular classical pilasters) but the pre-metal version of these columns in the US would have been masonry piers, which were usually built square or rectangular. I wonder if the mid-1800s decades of cast-iron columns got people to expect round columns, as fitting terra cotta fireproofing around steel columns to create round enclosures was certainly not the most obvious path to take.
The veneer stone has been removed at the bottom. I’m assuming it was an entire veneer wythe and not just the surface of the stone, because the back-up material we see varies: it’s stone in most areas that appears to match the veneer, it’s brick in some areas, and it’s terra cotta block in some areas. That there are three different types of back-up is in itself mildly odd: it may mean nothing more than some sloppy work when the building was first built, but I’d guess it means there have been some alterations to that facade. One possibility is that the building isn’t a skeleton frame but at some point the front facade was supported, in an alteration, at the second floor and the brick at the second floor spandrel beam is part of that work.
Speculation like this about a project that I looked at for about two minutes falls into the category of “Work is great. I could watch other people work all day.”
