Tag Archives: building

No, This is Not an Optical Illusion – It Fell Over

This barn is just south of Mount Vernon WA and very close to the interstate.  As I had driven by, it caught my eye and I resolved to head back before leaving the area.  The way in which the building has just slumped down looks almost fake and it seems like the image is somehow distorted rather than being a true reflection of the way the barn has collapsed.  What a fun looking thing!

Assembling Roof Beams with Cranes

A hangar has been under construction at Paine Field for a while and, while so much time has been taken up by the preparation of the groundwork, I happened to be there when they were assembling the frame of the hangar.  The long span that the finished structure will have is built up of two pieces with the side beams and the roof beams for one side being assembled on the ground and then two cranes being called in to lift both halves up simultaneously so that they can be bolted in the center to provide the rigidity needed.

Seeing the cranes holding these large frames in place and the crews using scissor lifts to get up to put the connections in place was quite neat.  Once the frames are in place, the process of cladding the building can take place in slower time.  Those cranes will have been expensive to rent so getting that heavy lifting done as fast as possible will have been the goal.

A Street and Houses Perched on a Manmade Cliff

The terrain around Bristol is pretty undulating.  Houses are built up the sides of hills on streets that are rather steep.  However, the buildings up in the Clifton area of town seem to have made better use of the land than might have seemed likely.  From low down beneath them, they seem awfully precarious but, since they have been there for well over 100 years, I guess they are reasonable solid.  The road in front of some of the buildings clearly seems to have been built up from very little with the arches supporting the roadway built on to the cliffs.  It all looks rather dramatic.  I suspect if you are up there, you are not as aware of what is beneath you but you will have little doubt of the vantage point you have looking across the surrounding countryside!

Rooftop Growth

We were taking a walk around the arboretum in Seattle.  It is owned by the University of Washington I think (if not, let me know in the comments) and it is laid out with various areas to spend time if you choose to stop walking for a while.  There is one open-sided building which could be used for a picnic of you were so inclined.  What caught my eye was just how much there was growing on the roof of the structure.  If you were looking down on it, it might be totally camouflaged!

Three Years of Building Progress

One of our earlier visits to Victoria had involved staying close by a building that was being demolished.  They were keeping the façade of the building intact and taking out the interior for rebuilding and development.  Three years has gone by since that visit and I was interested to see how the building was looking.  While some finishing and fit out still appears to be underway, the building appears to be complete.

They have retained the façade as anticipated and constructed a whole new building inside.  In addition, one source of the building had been removed to allow the demolition process to get underway and that now has a new structure grafted on to the building.  Consequently, there is a combination of the old and the modern in the way it is finished off.  I assume by the next time we are in Victoria, it will be open for business.  I don’t know when it was originally scheduled to be done but I assume the pandemic delayed things a little.

1930s Architecture at Its Best?

There was a building at the bottom of the dam at Grand Coulee that was part of the dam infrastructure.  Looking down on this building, it seemed so in keeping with a certain generation of architecture.  Concrete buildings were in vogue at that time and they were very functional and lacking in much in the way of aesthetics.  Given that this was part of the work generation program of the Great Depression, maybe the focus was on function rather than form.  I wonder what someone would do with such a requirement if they were commissioned to design such a building today.

Space Age Visitor Center

There is a visitor center for the Grand Coulee dam.  Sadly, as with a lot of similar things, it was closed while I was there due to the virus.  While I couldn’t go in, I was rather taken with the structure itself.  I’m not sure when it was built but it has a bit of a 70s space age feel about it.  When in the park lower down the hill, it looks a little like a flying saucer has landed above you.  I bet it looks interesting when lit up at night.

Building a Tower Crane

Tower cranes are ubiquitous in big cities.  The only way to construct tall buildings, there are the sign of a prosperous city when there are lots of them.  They can be a nuisance when you are taking photos of a skyline of course since they interrupt the flow of a cityscape.  You seen them all the time but you don’t often get to see how one is assembled.  When we were watching the tower construction across from our building in Chicago, we got to see the cranes being put together.

The first thing that is needed is a big crane!  Got to have a crane to make a crane!  The base was put in place and then the cab was lifted into place.  From this, the elements of both booms were lifted and attached.  Then the counterbalance weights could be added along with the machinery to do the lifting work.  It was fun to watch it all go together and to see the guys walking around on the structure once it was in place including all of the bracing elements.  Once the crane is complete, there is a sleeve section that allows the inner section to be slide up and a new section to be inserted.

Two cranes were built for this project.  They were both within the footprint of the building so it grew around them and they grew above it.  There was never terribly much of the crane exposed above the building so it was well supported.  One of the crane operators on this project used to take his camera up.  He had a great selection of images from up there with all sorts of things going on a round him and some incredibly variable weather.  I will have to see whether those images are still available online.

Sun Times Demolition

When we moved to Chicago, our apartment overlooked the Chicago Sun-Times building on Wabash Avenue alongside the Chicago River.  This plot was sold off for development with a large tower being built on its site.  The construction that followed will be another post but this one relates to the demolition process.  The view from our window provided a great view of the tearing down of the old building.  It didn’t hurt that much of it was done during the Chicago winter, but I could watch from the comfort of our living room.

The building came down pretty quickly.  Crews were using jack hammers to drill out the concrete flooring of each level and the machines that these were mounted on could also pull over the wall sections once cutting torches had taken out key elements of them.  There was plenty of cutting going on with torches taken out structure and piping.  This didn’t always go smoothly with more than one occasion when the cutting set fire to something and the fire department came to deal with it.  A lot of water from the hoses would pour out of the spaces in the walls and, given the low temperatures, lots of icicles would result.

There weren’t too many floors in the building with the lowest levels being where the printing presses had once been.  The whole thing came down quickly.  It wasn’t an attractive structure so we weren’t so sad to see it go.  However, since it was low, it gave us a good view across the river.  The new building would be 92 floors tall and was going to take out a chunk of our view but such is the way of things when you live downtown in a city that is constantly evolving.

Legislative Building at Night

Continuing the theme of casting back into the past for shots of things that compensate for not going anywhere anymore, this one isn’t too long ago.  Our visit to Victoria in the run up to Christmas involved staying in a hotel alongside the harbor.  We had a view from our hotel room across to the legislative building which is nicely illuminated at night – not just for Christmas but all the time.  Here is the shot from the hotel window!