For the past month or so, I've been involved in a project where we were called to look at a bulging brick wall which is nothing out of the ordinary for an engineer.

But in this particular case, my investigation lead to shutting the building down, and evacuating the tenants in order to install an internal protection frame to prevent possible collapse.

Let start in the beginning!

FIRST SIGNS OF DISTRESS

The building is on the corner of a street/avenue and the distress was located on the wall running across the length of the building.

The original call from our client was to look at the bulging face brick and the various masonry cracks and attempts to repair the cracks. Immediately upon arrival, I noticed that the exterior brick didn't have any header bricks, which are used to tie the outside layer to the inner layer.

If you look at the photo below, notice how all of the bricks run in the same direction. In most construction, the every 5th course of bricks will be turned and laid over both the face and inside brick. Another construction method is to use what is called a brick tie that sits in between bricks. Both of these methods are used to prevent the brick from falling off the wall.

If we looked closer at the wall, we see the bulging:

The lack of turned bricks and bulging raised a flag. You must understand what the building structural system is in order to understand why there is a failure. Most often, you can find out how the building is constructed by observing the structure from within, namely the basement because there aren't any architectural finishes covering the walls and underside of the 1st floor.

UNDERSTANDING HOW THE BUILDING STANDS

The next step is to look at the buildings structural system, which is often most easily observed from the basement since there are no architectural finishes hiding the structural system.

For this particular building, the basement foundation wall is constructed of rubble stone, which is large boulders of stone that have been cemented together. Ontop of the foundation wall is a red clay brick masonry wall that extends all the way to the roof.

At each level are wood floor joist that span from one side of the basement to the other, spanning the short direction of the building.

In short, the technical description for the building structural system would be

Wood floor joist bearing on a load bearing masonry wall that rests on a rubble stone foundation.

This isn't an uncommon construction method for the time period of construction, which I assumed to be late 1800s, early 1900s given the condition of the masonry joints.

Once we understood how the building was constructed, it became obvious that someone came and removed the outside layer of brick and installed a brand new one. The next step was to verify why face brick was bulging, and my assumption was that they did not use brick ties, which are used to tie face brick to the back up wall.

Here is a photo of the 1st floor here the face brick began to bulge out.

At Least that's what I initially thought!

So here is a sketch of how the wall was originally built:

And here is a sketch of how I think the wall was "repaired"

The item that I circled in red is the the brick tie, which I assume is missing, resulting in the face brick trying to peel away from the wall.

That's it for today! Excuse me for grammar and a bit of mis-typing, I know I do this a lot since I'm trying to post every day!

Tomorrow I'll keep following up with this project to let you know how crazy it has become!