A look back at 25 years

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As the holidays approach and we give thanks for all we have, I wanted to thank readers, and the Heralds, for the first 25 years of this column. I began writing it the first week of December 1989.

Many things have remained the same since that first column, and, of course, so much has changed. In 1992 we had a strong nor’easter, and that led to a series of questions about wind and flood damage, especially flooded basements. I rarely have a week go by when a reader doesn’t send a question about a flooding basement, and where the water could be coming from.

In my third year of architecture school at Kent State University, my professor, James Montalto, a former student of Frank Lloyd Wright, started a course called Methods and Materials with the mantra that the technical part of architectural and engineering design of buildings deals with two main issues: water and movement. Every part of buildings must deal with issues of moisture and changes due to movement. Minuscule changes, from temperature to gale-force winds, hydrostatic ocean-wave-activated pressures, earthquakes and other extremes are what we design for, not sunny days in July. Although I’d never expect a non-professional to know, or want to know, many of the 10,000 scientific, engineering or legal reasons why we design things the way we do, this column has always sought to bring home the basic ideas so that the untrained person could begin to grasp why they shouldn’t repeat history by attempting to build unsafe structures, large or small.

Much to the chagrin of fellow students, I began making a scrapbook of building disasters in college, in the hope that I could ask questions, get answers and avoid making the same mistakes that killed or injured innocent people who believed that architects and engineers were infallible. My first exploration was the Kansas City Hotel Skywalk disaster that killed 104 dancing party-goers at a reception when the two cable-hung bridges they were on collapsed. Next, the Ohio River bridge, right before the holidays, that saddened my friends and neighbors in Toledo.

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