With our focus on building envelope restoration, our work includes a lot of roof projects. In fact, in terms of square footage, some years have us working on more roofs than facades.

David May, RA, a founding partner of SUPERSTRUCTURES, participated in the workshop Increasing and Stabilizing Property Value in Today’s Market presented by FirstService Residential, contributing to a breakout session on Exterior Projects.

The latest edition of Retrofit magazine profiles our work on NYU's Carlyle Court, a project that utilized vacuum insulation panels (VIPs) to achieve high R-values on the building's roof and terraces within a minimal profile.

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.