Building Within : Building a Building in a Building

The beginning of the placement of the internal steel structure was a real turning point in the project. Just the size and shape of all the steel coming in really jolted your senses. After all, it was basically just a big hole with four brick walls up until that point. With the basement spaces taking shape and the big steel flying into place, the feeling of real progress was palpable. A hard date for reopening had been set. The expense of rebuilding had placed the owners under extremely stressful circumstances and they had to get the doors open and generating revenue as soon as possible. There's a lot of preamble and waiting for certain basic infrastructure to get finished before the other crafts can bring in their crews and begin working in a new structure. But once things reach a certain point, there can suddenly be dozens of workers for multiple crafts all moving, materials and workers at once. Charles, our on-site foreman, was one of those really colorful older gentleman, whose knowledge and depth of understanding was mind-blowing. As well as a calm and thoughtful demeanor in his actions, Charles always knew exactly what was going to happen and in exactly what order. He called the shots.

So there was a lot of steel that had to be placed and bolted and then welded together. Many hundreds of pieces, no two of which were the same. It was truly a giant erector set couched in a puzzle. The picture in the lower right below illustrates on that back wall, the profusion of shadows of old stairways, high doorways, and bricked-up windows. The stubs of wooden roof beams outlining the original roof structure.

Watching these guys work was impressive. The crane operator can't see what's happening. The steel foreman is talking to him on a radio and clearly, they have a very special way of communicating, nudging 2 ton beams an inch or two at a time. All these pieces have to line up just so as to be able to get the bolts through the right holes and nuts on the bolts. It was an aerial ballet of flying steel.

Some days we had dueling cranes. Like giant chopsticks poised overhead, ready to pick bits and pieces from the bowl!

In the pictures below you can get a real sense of just how many pieces of steel there were and how they had to be put together. There were insane angles that were visually strange. Angles going up when you expected them to go down. Main floor beams that curved like a banana.

One of the most visually striking things to me about these photos is the apparent curvature of many of the beams. In fact, most of them look slightly bent. Not surprisingly, this is a design function. When I first looked at the photos I thought that my camera/lens combo was distorting the picture. Some distortion is normal when using cheap equipment and lenses so I just thought damn, I should have splurged on a real cam. I went back anyway and looked carefully at these beams and sure enough, the damn things are all curved or more properly stated, they are crowned.

All the giant steel beams that supported large expanses of the floor are purposely crowned. If they weren't, the weight of the concrete slab, everything built on it, and the large number of humans that would eventually occupy the area would deform the floor and make it sag. So they build these huge steel beams with the exact amount of opposite deformity to offset the eventual load on the structure. By the time everything was finished, those beams were flat as a pancake!