Foundations : A New Era For An Old Building

As the new foundations were being poured, the workers were laying out the steel reinforcing that would form the floor. One of the really interesting parts of this process was seeing all the infrastructure, pipes, and drains that had to be placed within the web of steel before the concrete is added to the form. You can see below that you end up with a lot of pipe and steel sticking up out of the floor in what appears to be random patterns. Obviously, it's meticulously planned ahead of time.

With the basement floor in place, the masons started building the cinder block walls for storage, mechanical rooms, bathrooms and offices. As the cinder block walls were built, steel rebar was added to every hollow space, and those spaces were filled with concrete. This building inside a building was going to be seriously well built!

In many of these shots you can see the many scars of the fire as well as all the mysterious angles of doorways and windows that were bricked up over the years. There are large shadows of angles that must have been stairways yet there are other angles cut into the walls that nobody had any idea what they would have been used for, let alone how they were made.

As the basement took shape and the walls filled in we were able to finally get a feel for how it was going to work, in terms of space and layout. There is a very real issue that has tripped up more than one architect and builder. This has to do with the fact that when you are planning for these things, you are always looking at a scaled down version, and usually it's a top down view of a floor plan on a piece of paper. A giant building represented on an 8 1/2X11 piece of paper is not really a good representation. You get used to seeing things small and out of scale. This is SOP for all building projects. The problem is that down-scaling tends to enlarge the margin of error. There is not an inch of give in this building process. Generally speaking, plans need to be within 1/8" of correct for all the parts and pieces of such a large building to fit right. If you are off by a couple of inches in some area of the plans, when they try to build it, it won't fit! That brings everything to a grinding halt while the planners and builders try to figure out a workaround. It's very irritating to pay people to stand around while the brain trust figures out their error. There was a really major measurement error on this project and it was extremely costly, but I'll get to that later. Just know that looking at scale plans does not give you any real idea of how the actual space will look or feel. It's just amazing how different the physical space is, from what you assumed it would be. Looking at a scaled-down version on paper just doesn't translate perfectly to physical space.