AIC's 52nd Annual Meeting

Thousands of skyscrapers decorate the landscape of the United States. As they continue to pop up in cities from coast to coast many of the existing ones are ageing. In New York City alone there are over 1 million buildings, with an average age of 53 years. of this million 15,695 of them are over six stories and of those, 7000 are skyscrapers (over 115 ft. tall). The probability of encountering unknowns during restorations on buildings of this size is one hundred percent.

In New York City there is a local law—FISP (Façade Inspection & Safety Program) formally known as Local Law 11, which requires the inspection of all buildings over six stories high every five years. This inspection law had roots in a 1979 incident when a piece of terracotta fell and killed a college student. The law was expanded and made mandatory in 1998 after a large portion of a 39-story brick façade collapsed onto Madison Avenue. Currently, most urban centers have adopted similar inspection requirements.

With these cyclical inspections comes cyclical maintenance programs. However, maintenance on a large-scale historic structure is very different from just setting up a scaffold here and there. Mobilization of a forty-story building can cost more than the maintenance repairs themselves and can easily range from 2 to 4 million dollars. Surprises will be discovered during construction work, and assumptions must be made and repairs budgeted for what isn’t known prior to mobilization.

Expectations are managed by using historic construction documents from the building itself or from similar aged and sized structures. Managing large scale unknowns is a skill that not all conservators are familiar with, and how these uncertainties are planned for can make or break a restoration project. This presentation will provide examples of challenges that have arisen on buildings of this size and general guidelines for best practices when approaching large scale uncertainties in conservation.