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Old Posted Feb 21, 2018, 4:00 PM
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Mr Downtown Mr Downtown is offline
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The "office building" fronting Van Buren is steel frame with tile arches, 12'8" floor-to-floor. The 1921 building on the east side is steel frame, floor details not known, 16 ft floor-to-floor. The workroom building is steel frame encased in concrete, 19 ft floor-to-floor. The details of the floors isn't explicit in any of my sources, but it sounds like they were poured concrete that enclosed the steel beams. Since the ceilings would be left unfinished, plywood or pressed wood was specified for the formwork. The structural bays were a rather unusual 29'10.5" x 44'9". The real engineering legerdemain was transferring the building's loads to caissons that avoided the railroad tracks underneath, which required unusual transfer girders and even caissons with oval bells! Magnus Gunderson of Graham, Anderson, Probst & White was the main engineer.

Assuming I'm not the only nerd who might be interested, I'll spend some pixels to post his description from the Oct. 1931 Journal of the Western Society of Engineers:

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