The old rules of thumb never looked so important as now.
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Author Archives : Ciro Cuono, P.E.
Ciro Cuono P. E., is the founding Principal of Cuono Engineering PLLC, a structural engineering firm located in White Plains and Manhattan, NY and is an Adjunct Instructor at Manhattan College. He has over 24 years of experience in structural design of new buildings and renovations and restorations of existing historic structures. He may be reached at (ccuono@cuonoengineering.com).
Structural steel has been a dominant building material for more than 100 years. Although steel is not considered a particularly remarkable material today, Vaclav Smil’s book, Still the Iron Age, illustrates how important iron and steel have been and continue to be in industrialized societies. For a structural engineer working on historic renovations and adaptive reuse of pre-war buildings, working knowledge of the history, development, and metallurgy of structural metals is necessary for the engineer to be effective and efficient. …
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Engineering schools routinely train young engineers in new systems and materials to prepare them to enter the workforce. However, renovations and adaptive reuse of existing buildings are often overlooked or omitted in an already packed undergraduate schedule. The reality of construction today is that there is a high probability that most engineers will, at some point in their careers, work in some capacity on an existing building. Especially in dense urban environments, or in the older parts of the country with a large stock of existing structures, it is often a better use of resources and more respectful of the environment to reuse and adapt an existing building. …
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A Call for Leadership
Design-Build, though not new as a delivery method for building projects, appears to be on the rise. Traditionally known as the Master-Builder method, it is a means of building where one party holds responsibility for both the design and the construction. The Master-Builder method was the only method before the now ubiquitous design-bid-build project structure. The Romans for example, famous for their roads, aqueducts, and amphitheaters, did not design a project, bid it out to subcontractors, and then select the low bidder to build it, but rather designed and built structures in a collaborative, somewhat simultaneous fashion. …
The great fires of the 1800s in Chicago, New York, and elsewhere spurred a technology race to develop the best fireproof floor system. The years between the 1870s and 1940s represented a golden age of new technology in structural systems. Cast iron, wrought iron, structural steel and reinforced concrete framing systems, terra cotta arch construction, cinder concrete slabs, and many proprietary systems were introduced during this period. …
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