Performance expectations of early 20^th century urban American building foundations

Foundation reuse is a tricky business at the best of times. For structures predating the mid-20th century, the challenge is exacerbated by the presence of a variety of foundation types, techniques and materials no longer in current usage, such as lime-based mortar. Accordingly, the modern engineer is presented with the difficulty of making decisions about assessment and intervention strategies for construction systems, geometries, and methods for which there is no applicable current building code or easily accessible textbook. As foundation reuse, particularly of early 20th century urban buildings, gains in popularity, accessing such information will only gain in criticality. This paper was designed to help amalgamate such information and provide upper limits regarding performance expectations of such foundations based on the building codes, practices and testing data of the early 1900s, with a typical upper compressive strength of lOMPa for hard brick in lime. Copyright ASCE 2008.