Eat Your Heart Out, Piranesi

From a site visit, Ellen presents us with a view up a church spire:

She was standing on one internal platform, looking past two others. This being New York, a lot of our masonry spires have steel framing inside them to provide triangulated bracing. In this case, bracing that’s been repaired before and we’re looking at now.

I know of multiple churches where spires had to be removed because wind forces were slowly, or not so slowly, racking them to pieces. We’ve had a number of projects where we strengthened spires, often by adding diagonal braces similar to those seen here. The short version is that spires did not usually receive engineering design until the twentieth century, and not always then. So there are a lot of pretty churches with spires built of masonry of questionable stability.

If you’re unfamiliar with the Carceri d’invenzione – Imaginary Prisons – of Giovanni Battista Piranesi, I recommend starting: here. His engravings have little to do with prisons. Rather, Piranesi wanted to play with perspective and building forms without being troubled by reality.