From kindergarten classrooms to college lecture halls, the new academic year is in full swing. So it’s a good time to review our record of work for educational clients. We’re proud to have worked on many primary and secondary school buildings in New York, as well as facilities on several of the outstanding college campuses of the region.

On this day in 1776, the Great Fire of New York devastated a quarter of the city, at that time comprising a densely packed triangle on the lower tip of Manhattan. Burning into the following morning, the fire destroyed most of the buildings west of Broadway and as far north as Barclay Street. There, it was stopped by the largely undeveloped campus of King’s College (the future Columbia University). In the midst of this conflagration, St. Paul’s Chapel, a satellite of Trinity Church, was spared.

When students return to Brooklyn’s George Westinghouse High School today, they’ll be walking in the footsteps of Jay-Z and the Notorious B.I.G. This year, they’ll also be walking under the school’s loggia featuring newly restored, Guastavino-tiled vaulting. SUPERSTRUCTURES helped preserve the school’s vaults as part of our Lucy G. Moses Preservation Award-winning exterior restoration.

Given that buildings are responsible for 40% of global energy consumption, it’s desirable to improve their operational efficiency in the process of preserving them in general. But there’s a crucial caveat: embodied energy must be factored into the project.

For many years, a building’s array of exterior surfaces has been known as its “envelope.” To the extent that envelope is analogous to enclosure, one organization, the International Institute of Building Enclosure Consultants (IIBEC), recently declared that they’re retiring envelope in favor of enclosure, inviting others to join them in this semantic revolution. But we're sticking with envelope.

The latest seminar in our monthly continuing education series considered three options for roofing—white, blue, and green. About 95 clients and colleagues joined us for this look at roof varieties with Brian Kelly of Kemper System.

On this day in 1867, architect Henry Hornbostel was born in Brooklyn. With credentials from both Columbia University and the Ecole des Beaux Arts, Paris, Hornbostel worked with various firms in both New York and Pittsburgh. He designed a wide range of buildings and infrastructure, from facilities for Columbia and Carnegie Mellon Universities to the Williamsburg Bridge. His only building in upstate New York is the New York State Education Building in Albany (1908-11), a neoclassical tour de force characterized by a colonnade of 90-foot-high Corinthian columns. SUPERSTRUCTURES conducted a facade investigation of this Albany landmark.

We frequently get variations on this question from clients. They also tend to ask some version of “if it were your money, how would you spend it?” We take our clients’ viewpoint by addressing these common questions on every project. This is part of why we’ve been retained for more exterior restoration projects than any other firm in NYC.

Many of our projects focus on single elements of a building’s exterior envelope, such as a facade, roof, or fenestration. In the case of NYU’s 404 Lafayette / 708 Broadway facility, it was “all of the above,” and more.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs or “drones”) are everywhere—from assisting first responders to delivering pizza. Everywhere, that is, except in New York City. You may have heard that drone use is prohibited within the five boroughs. That’s essentially true,* thanks to a 1948 law that requires all aircraft to take off and land only from airports, as well as FAA restrictions on airspace that eliminate most of the skies over the Big Apple. But for SUPERSTRUCTURES and our clients, this ban is a barrier to using drones for facade inspections through methods like our SurfaceCapture,SM which relies on UAVs to help us create high-resolution scans of a facade for off-site assessment.