Advice From Long Ago

From a 1915 book titled Engineering Office Systems and Methods, some thoughts on how to design a steel-frame building:

My thoughts on the thoughts:

No one today would attempt to write a single book that covered every possible topic for a consulting engineering company from the design requirements for a half-dozen building types to how to manage the office budget. One could argue that the world is more complicated now than then, but I’m not really sure how true that is. We have a lot of tools that simplify things – emailing PDFs rather than worrying about a half-dozen different types of postage for letters and parcels, for example – that would have sounded like science-fiction in 1915.

This was still in general the age of built-up members for anything heavier than an I-beam, which is why the column cross section will be “as influenced by details of beam and girder connections.” If you’re planning on using cross-bracing for lateral load, and therefore in general only need simple connections of beams to columns, then you could use a simple(ish) built-up section; if you’re planning on a moment frame with every (or almost every) beam-to-column connection active, then you need heavier columns.

There are a few oddities based on the construction of the era: the “deadening” referred to is the layer of loose fill that all tile-arch floors and many concrete floors of the era had between the structure and the finish flooring. Language was still adapted for tile-arch floors: “concrete,” “terra cotta,” and “etc.” are three types of panel between the steel beams, with all three words serving as modifiers to “floor-arches.” I occasionally heard concrete workers refer to concrete floor spans as “arches” as late as the end of the 1980s.

Note that the steel columns in this “steel frame office building” might be sitting on cast-iron bases at the foundations.

Perhaps most interesting: both dead and live loads should include loads for “future floors.” I’ve seen drawings for a few buildings of this era that had several future-expansion floors ghosted in at the top of the building: not present to be built, but included in the design just in case. The logic of doing so was a reduction in first cost to get the larger building at a later date, but it just so happens that it was a quite green concept way ahead of its time.