Customer Reviews

Structural Renovation of Buildings: Methods, Details, & Design Examples

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This book is well organized and presented. It covers a lot, and is more comprehensive than other books of its type. It has very good material on concrete design/repair, and also covers wood structures, steel, and pre-engineered buildings quite well. The material on masonry is also good, but a discussion about rusted steel lintels embedded in masonry would have helpful, as this is a common source of problems in 20th century buildings. There are few handbooks that come as close as this one to a thorough treatment of the subject, and it is a useful book for architects and engineers who deal with renovation.

While this text explores renovation of a wide variety of building systems -- reinforced and post-tensioned concrete, wood, steel, masonry -- from a structural engineering perspective, it is quite pragmatically written and a non-engineer will derive considerable benefit from it. The book provides an excellent and detailed guide to critical issues that are confronted in period restoration, including making transparent best practices for undertaking the investigative process to evaluate salvagable components and structures for each type of building system. Filled with well-researched historical data about material types, it also contains excellent reference sections at the end of each chapter. An outstanding resource for those who are serious about building restoration.

A comprehensive book but with some strange omissions: very little on foundations or restrained brickwork. Also, the section on FRPs looks like it came straight out of a contractor's brochure. But these don't really detract that much. Strongly recommended.

Renovations types are defined, methods of investigation, solutions proposed,case studies and additional reading are presented for further assistance. Structural revonations are common works this book is a 'must buy' when conducting these works.

This is the best book I know of on the topic of structural renovation of buildings. Though probably no book could answer every question you might have, the 800+ pages of this book will answer most of them.

The author, Alexander Newman, is clearly an experienced expert, so this book is authoritative and has a very practical orientation, with a straightforward writing style, both basic and specialized information on a wide variety of topics, and plenty of helpful illustrations of details which can be used on your projects.

I should also add that much of the information in this book is directly relevant to structures other than buildings, so don't miss out on this book if you're involved in renovation of other types of structures.

Highly recommended to anyone involved in structural renovation, and worth every penny.

Excellent book and very practical - explains how and why to renovate and discusses the complications and consequences of some renovations. It also discusses whether demolish-and-rebuild should be considered or when to perform complex analyses that may demonstrate that renovation can be avoided.

I admit to being a bit biased. I received this book as part of an ASCE course taught by the author. However the book was supplementary material, not the text of the course, and I learned many additional things by reading the book after the course.

This book covers renovation due to seismic and wind loading, and also as a result of change of use, damage, and deterioration due to age. Steel, concrete, wood, unreinforced masonry, slabs-on-grade, and pre-engineered metal building systems are covered. The book explains testing methods (destructive and non-destructive) and the limitations of, or difficulty in using these methods. It discusses the history and evolution of the different types of construction and how that impacts renovation.

Some topics are explicitly omitted (e.g. post-tensioned slabs-on-grade, bonded post-tensioned structures), and discussion of interior non-structural features is limited to a few pages. Many renovation procedures are fully described, and when the user is referred elsewhere for more detailed information, these references are generally readily available - e.g., ACI specs or AISC Design Guides. Possible negative consequences of various remediation methods are discussed.

Overall this is a thorough and thought-provoking coverage of structural renovation.

I have had to design and manage a number of structural rehabilitations; I wish I would have had this book ten years ago. It is an excellent reference for engineers with both limited and extensive experience in structural retrofitting and rehabilitation.

In my office where projects are small commercial or residential, I find Mr. Newman's book a basic resource for renovation work. This comprehensive handbook provides either a solution or more considerations that were not obvious at first. It is a main staple I turn to for guidance on renovations of all structure types and materials.