Choosing

When I was formally studying history – in electives during my undergrad engineering education and as my major in grad school – a certain theme came up again and again: historical research is about choosing. If you’re looking at history of recent centuries, there are always more facts than you can fit into a narrative, whatever the purpose of that narrative is. So you have to choose which facts you will record in your research notes and then again chose which research notes you use in your writing. Inevitably this means that your research reflects your views in some ways. I’m interested in the history of building-structure technology and so my writing – including blog posts – focuses on technological changes in buildings rather than social or decorative changes.

Part of the rationale for choosing is to keep from getting overwhelmed with extraneous data. Here’s a statement of historical fact: I’m typing this at my deck at home on the evening of January 5, 2025. I chose a location and date as the interesting facts about the context for writing. I could expand this greatly by describing my clothing (blue tee shirt, black gym shorts), the objects on my desk, the furniture around my desk, what’s hanging on the walls of the room, what’s in each desk drawer, and so on. I’ve chosen to skip those facts – which are just as true as the location and date – because in my opinion they add nothing to the narrative of the writing of the blog post. So there’s an example of my bias in choosing facts to report.

In keeping all of the technical records from all of our old projects, we’re creating a universe of too many facts to use at any given time. So a database of technical information to be gleaned from the old projects has to be based in choosing which facts are important enough to highlight. In other words, we can always open up the old project records and start reading to look for something obscure, but the index should contain enough basic information that for ordinary questions that is not necessary. What’s needed to describe building structure, when we’re talking about buildings in New York from the mid-1800s to the present?

Here’s the information submitted to the Department of Buildings in 1896 for an office building at 12 John Street. (It’s still there, now converted to apartments.) Questions 1 through 7 are pretty basic information, still required in almost the same form on new-building filings today. Then we get to a lot of descriptions of the exterior masonry, because almost everything built at that time had bearing walls. Questions 19 through 21 were meant to describe interior structure and usually contained notes about wood joists and girders, or wrought iron beams. In this case, the engineer submitted a letter saying that the structure would be a version of the then-new steel skeleton frame. This form is actually a decent summary of what we need today: vertical load-carrying elements (material and type), floor framing, floor system (what spans between the beams?), lateral-load system, exterior walls, and foundations. We have a few other fields in the database, but those are enough to give a general sense of the structure, in order to decide if the dive into the full records is worth the effort.