The Bearing Wall

The dead load is the weight that never leaves, the weight of the thing itself — the concrete and the steel and the gypsum board and the roofing membrane and the mechanical ducts and the insulation batt pressed between st

The first thing you notice at a collapse site is not the destruction but the geometry of the destruction, the specific angles at which things have come to rest, because a structure does not simply fall, it falls along th

A load path is the route a force takes through a structure from the point of application to the foundation.

Spalling is the delamination and flaking of concrete from its surface, the visible evidence of an internal failure — usually the corrosion of the reinforcing steel, which expands as it rusts, creating tensile forces in t

The inspection records arrived on Thursday in a second box, this one from the Chicago Department of Buildings, delivered by a clerk who asked Ada to sign three forms acknowledging receipt and one form acknowledging that

The capacity of a section is determined by its geometry and its material properties — the width of the beam, the depth of the beam, the area of the reinforcing steel, the strength of the concrete, the yield strength of t

Redundancy in structural engineering is the provision of multiple load paths so that if one element fails, the load can be carried by another, and the structure as a whole survives the local failure — it is the engineeri

The names appeared in the Tribune on Monday morning, ten days after the collapse, in an article on page three of the Metro section that Ada read standing at the kitchen counter with her coffee going cold because she had