Keep The Scale In Mind

Here’s a photo from yesterday of Shaquana getting a good look at a brownstone finial that’s been removed during restoration work.

This is a minor decorative element for the church it was removed from. It’s visually important, of course, and we’re not removing it to throw it away, but it’s a small and structurally unimportant piece of the building as a whole. Take a good look at it. That’s maybe four or five cubic feet of stone, weighing something like 600 to 700 pounds. It needs to be re-anchored because even an unimportant piece of the building can be hazardous if it’s that big.

The facade inspection regulations of the New York Department of Buildings require close-up observation of conditions. The main reason for this is, simply, that there is damage that will be visible when you are as couple of feet away from the facade, standing on a scaffold, that will not be visible when you’re looking through binoculars, standing in the street. But it seems to me that a secondary reason is that the person performing a facade inspection needs to be able to make judgements about risk, and that means having a sense of not just whether a piece of ornament might fall, but the consequences if it were to do so. You need to have a real sense of how big the pieces are.