There are countless buildings in New York City that owe their elegance to terracotta. Caring for it, though, has grown more complicated and expensive in the past few years. Richard Koenigsberg, the founder and president of Koenigsberg Engineering, explains why this is so and what to expect if terracotta is on your building. Richard Koenigsberg is interviewed by Carol Ott for Habitat Magazine.
Thanks for listening. Subscribe to this podcast for more stories on how New York co-ops and condos have solved a myriad of problems. Brought to you by Habitat Magazine, the "bible" that hundreds of board directors turn to every day!
There are countless buildings in New York City that owe their elegance to terracotta. Caring for it, though, has grown more complicated and expensive in the past few years. Richard Koenigsberg, the founder and president of Koenigsberg Engineering, explains why this is so and what to expect if terracotta is on your building. Richard Koenigsberg is interviewed by Carol Ott for Habitat Magazine.
Thanks for listening. Subscribe to this podcast for more stories on how New York co-ops and condos have solved a myriad of problems. Brought to you by Habitat Magazine, the "bible" that hundreds of board directors turn to every day!
Carol Ott: Welcome to Problem Solved, a conversation about problems that have been solved in New York's co-op and condo buildings. I'm Carol Ott, publisher and editor-in-chief of Habitat Magazine. My guest today is engineer Richard Koenigsberg, the founder and president of Koenigsberg Engineering, located in New York City.
There are countless buildings in New York City that owe their elegance to terracotta. Caring for it, though, has grown more complicated and expensive in the past few years. Richard is here to tell us why and what you can expect when doing a terracotta fix. Welcome.
Richard Koenigsberg: Hi, thank you.
Carol Ott: It used to be that if your building had damaged terracotta, you could simply repair it. That's not always the case now. So can you tell us why, and what the rules are today?
Richard Koenigsberg: Well, you're subject to a lot of different rules from a lot of different agencies. Anybody that's been involved in a building that's more than six stories knows that Local Law 10, recently changed to Local Law 11, now called FISP, is the primary driver of the facade repairs, because we're in the ninth cycle now. It's been going on since 1980, for 45 years. Every five years there's another cycle, and that's the primary driver for facade repairs, because every five years you do an inspection; that's when you find out you need work. And the DOB (Department of Buildings) that reviews those reports could be very tough. At the beginning, they weren't. When it started out in 1980, you basically just had to submit a report and they accepted it. But as each year goes by and there are more accidents, they're much tougher about reviewing those reports. That's one agency that you have to answer to. Of course, you're also answering to Landmarks — LPC — on any building that’s a landmark. And then you're also filing permits for the repairs, so you're also answering to the other department that reviews repairs.
Richard Koenigsberg: So what you said a few minutes ago was perfect. You used to be allowed. They didn't used to scrutinize the type of repairs that you did. Landmarks only cares what it looks like when you're done. With the DOB, you pretty much could file a repair permit for whatever kind of repairs you want to do. But Local Law 11 has changed their attitude over the last few years and they prefer to see engineers replace damaged terracotta rather than to just repair it in place. That's been one big change.
Richard Koenigsberg: Then another big change with Landmarks is that about two years ago, I think in October, they changed their standards to wanting any replacement done with terracotta to be done with real terracotta if it's below the sixth floor. You have exceptions for large things like a water table or a balcony, but aside from isolated replacement of pieces, they want real terracotta. So you've got the combination of these two agencies where five years ago, 90% of repairs to terracotta were in place repairs, meaning you installed a pin, you installed epoxy. Now you've got the Local Law 11 driving you to replace pieces and you've got Landmarks who's saying once those pieces need to be replaced, they need to be replaced with real terracotta, which is very, very complicated.
Carol Ott: Tell us, what is terracotta and where do you get it today?
Richard Koenigsberg: Okay. Terracotta is a ceramic. It's made of clay, and where you get it, there used to be another one company, Midwest Terracotta. I worked in Chicago for a lot of years and a lot of their terracotta was made by Midwest Terracotta. But for the last 30 years, I think at least, almost all the terracotta that you come across is made either by Gladding McBean in California or by Boston Valley, which is Upstate New York. I visited the plant in California and it's located near natural clay deposits, because that's what it is. It's just a clay that's fired in a kiln, like ceramic coffee cups that you make. It's generally glazed. It could be glazed or unglazed or different types of clays, but that's what it is. It's a fired clay. It's used a lot in a lot of the water pipes that we have or tiles on rooftops. Technically, that's also called terracotta.
Carol Ott: So, they're only two manufacturers of terracotta?
Richard Koenigsberg: There are only at this time, like I said, Midwest is pretty huge around Chicago and the Midwest, but for as long as I've been working, it's only been two manufacturers in the United States.
Carol Ott: And if you're a building that needs to buy and replace its terracotta, can you actually get competitive bids from only two companies?
Richard Koenigsberg: You can. I mean, I've probably worked on 40 buildings where I've had custom replacement and I've gone to these two companies. There's a third company in England, used to be called Shaws of Darwin, and then Ibstock Hathernware; I recently got a call from them. They shut down a while ago, but they're back up and running and they have done some jobs for New York and they're going by the name Darwin's now, just Darwin's, and they are competitive, because it's not that much tougher to ship from England as it is from California to New York and they know they have to be competitive. But to answer your question, even with two companies, it could be pretty competitive. They want jobs. The people that work in this industry tend to be artists, so they care about the buildings, they care about the jobs and they want everyone on an interesting building.
Carol Ott: Explain to me, if I have terracotta, for instance, around my roof area or at the top of my building and it has to be replaced, how — just one piece or 10 pieces — how does that get measured? I don't quite get how it gets measured and then it gets fit and then it gets installed.
Richard Koenigsberg: Well here, the most complicated part about these pieces, what's interesting — the manufacturers are always eager to have engineers and architects visit to see what they do. The pieces are generally made from molds. Pieces that are very repetitive could be extruded — like the old Play-Doh machines where the pieces come out and they're cut as they come out, that's extruded — most pieces tend to be made out of molds. The molds have to be made 10% bigger than the actual piece, because after they make the piece in clay, it's put on a drying floor for anywhere from a week to a month to two months, for all the moisture to get out of it. Because if they put the wet clay in the fire, it'll crack.
Richard Koenigsberg: I've had some pieces that were six, 700 pounds. They might have to sit on a drying floor for a month or two before they could be put in the kiln. So the molds are the first thing that you need to make: these molds, which have to be made 10% bigger than the piece. That's what makes it so much more complicated than making pieces out of other materials like concrete, which don't shrink.
Richard Koenigsberg: Let's say you have a big lion's head made out of terracotta. If you were going to replicate it with concrete, you could just take a rubber mold of the lion's head, pour the material in and you got your piece. You never really need to measure. You never need to do a drawing. You just make a mold from the actual piece. But with terracotta, your mold has to be 10% bigger than the piece.
Richard Koenigsberg: So they will always do shop drawings, which are isometric drawings, front view, side views, top view, with measurements. Then they have to make molds that are 10% bigger, which is why they tend to attract a lot of artists, because all of those things that you're seeing, gargoyles and lions and flowers, those all have to be carved out by hand and they basically have to make a positive mold. They have to duplicate it 10% bigger than the actual piece, then make a mold from that piece that's 10% bigger.
Carol Ott: And how expensive is this? This sounds like hard work ...
Richard Koenigsberg: Yeah, molds tend to be anywhere from 1,000 to 2,000; they could be much more, but to make a mold, might be anywhere from a thousand to 2,500 for the average piece and making the model. Like I said, because first they're making a model, then from the model they're making a mold. I jumped ahead. What they'll call is, what you need to do is you generally need to ship the piece to them. They can't do this with photographs. They'll call that a fragment. So you'll have to survey the building, and if a piece is missing or damaged to the point where it's unrecognizable, you might try to find a similar piece. Like I said, if it's a scroll, you might not have the exact one, but you're going to want to pull a piece out of the building and actually ship it to the manufacturer.
Carol Ott: I see.
Richard Koenigsberg: The first thing you want to do, what I do is when we survey a building, I do my drawings very differently than most engineers or architects. We identify every single piece of terracotta on the building and I've done this, like I said, 30, 40 times over the last 30 years, where we will survey the building and make a set of drawings that identifies every single piece of terracotta on the building. And then we label each one.
Richard Koenigsberg: Let's say you have a water table that might be five courses. A course is just a row, so your water table has some flat pieces in the bottom and then they continue to project outward. So I'll label and let's say it's a fifth floor water table, I'll label the five rows five A, B, C, and D, and then you'll label left pieces, middle pieces, right pieces. I'll start out by labeling every piece of terracotta on the whole building, because it's such an expensive process. Like I said, every single mold you need could add a couple thousand dollars. So first, we'll do that: label every piece, then we'll survey the building and I will identify the condition of every piece. I'll identify it, let's say on a scale of one to 10, 10 meaning it must be replaced. It's missing or damaged beyond recognition. Nine would be very severe damage. And then I'll have pieces, let's say rated six or seven, which are pieces that are pretty damaged, so I want to replace them, but I don't absolutely have to. So I might be able to pull the piece out, repair it and reinstall it. And the reason I'll do that is, because the molds are such an expensive process.
Richard Koenigsberg: If I have, let's say, scrolls on a building and I have 20 of them that are damaged, of course I'm going to make a mold and I'm going to go ahead, and I'm going to use that mold to make 20 pieces. But if I have a piece that's very ornamental and there's only one of them on the whole building, I'm not going to want to spend $5,000 just to make a mold for one piece.
Richard Koenigsberg: I take a very scientific approach to it. I start out by identifying every single mold I want in a building. And you mentioned before, how do I get competitive bids? Every engineer that does this kind of work is used to soliciting competitive bids from contractors to do the work. I actually do a whole separate set of bid documents that's to the terracotta vendors and I'll send it to Gladding, McBean; Boston Valley; and now Darwin's, they're in the game, so we'll have three. And basically what I'll put in those documents is I'll put a of each piece with the dimensions of each piece and the number that we're going to need, and then we'll get a price for each mold, excuse me, and each additional piece.
Carol Ott: And when you're doing a FISP project and your building does have terracotta on it, in terms of the timeline, how much additional time do you factor in for the terracotta assessment and then preparation?
Richard Koenigsberg: Well, so the number that these vendors are going to often throw out to you is they're going to say that they can make a piece of terracotta in four months. And that's generally true. They're all a little more backlogged now than usual, but they can make a piece in four months. But that's four months after they have approved shop drawings. That could take a long time. If your building just knows that it has bad terracotta, but you don't have a sidewalk shed and you don't have an engineer and you don't have a contractor, you're a long way from starting that four month clock. That four month clock requires that you pull out that damaged piece that's bad, that you ship it to Upstate New York or to California or to England, that they then measure the piece and they do drawings of the piece. After they do drawings, these shop drawings, they email them to you, the engineer, and you want to get on the building and verify that it's measured perfectly.
Richard Koenigsberg: And when I say perfectly, I mean, you want to be accurate to within a 16th of an inch. If you could imagine if all your pieces are the joints between the terracotta, between pieces of terracotta, typically is about an eighth of an inch to three sixteenths, so if your piece is an eighth of an inch too small, that joint could be twice as big as it should be. So the measurements are extremely, extremely important. So you got to first identify the damage to the piece, pull the damage to the piece out, ship it to the vendor. The vendor has to then do a shop drawing. They send the shop drawing to the engineer. Then the engineer has to sign off on that shop drawing. And that's what you would call an approved shop drawing. At that point their goal is to get you to piece within four months.
Carol Ott: And during this period of time, if you've had a sidewalk shed up because you're doing other facade work, let's say you've finished the other facade work, but you're still waiting for the terracotta. Do you have to keep the sidewalk shed there?
Richard Koenigsberg: Yes. Yeah, it's unusual. When the pieces of terracotta are out, I mean, it all depends how many pieces you've removed, but typically if it's scattered isolated pieces, you'll see it filled in just with a piece of wood, a two by four or some shoring, until the pieces are made.
Richard Koenigsberg: The planning is really what's most important. Like I said, it was a period when I was working in Chicago 10, 15 years ago, when you drove down the street, you saw dozens of terracotta buildings with thousands or hundreds, sometimes a thousand, pieces missing shored up with wood. They might be covered with plastic for a period of six months, eight months, or even a lot longer. And you're starting to see that in New York too. If you drive, let's say up West End where almost all the buildings have terracotta and they're all landmarked, you'll see the repairs don't just happen vertically. The repairs happen all over the building, all those scattered pieces are removed. You have wood shoring in there, and then you might have a period where you're waiting four, six, eight months for the pieces to be delivered.
Richard Koenigsberg: But if you plan properly, if you know that's what you're facing, like we've talked about the Ansonia that all the top half of it's done, and we only started that a year and a half ago, there was a lot of other work to do. We chemically cleaned the building. We had to scrape and paint all the windows and a ton of cast iron. The terracotta didn't delay us at all, not a bit, because we knew that. We knew that terracotta is always that weak link and the last thing to get done. So the second we had access to any areas, we surveyed them, identified the terracotta, shipped it and got the pieces made.
Richard Koenigsberg: Then once that was happening, we did the cleaning, the tuck pointing, the brick replacement, all the stuff that didn't require custom material. And we've gotten through most of the job in two years, which is what was planned, because it was so large and we never waited for terracotta. Gladding, McBean did a good job delivering it. For a while during the pandemic, they were very short staffed and it looked like they would have some unexpected six month delays, but they came through and got us the pieces. And at the end of the day, the terracotta didn't slow us down at all.
Carol Ott: So for your final advice for boards who are looking to do some facade work and have terracotta on their buildings, what would you advise them?
Richard Koenigsberg: Well, I would start by saying not selfishly, I wouldn't consider using anyone that hasn't replaced terracotta on at least a dozen buildings, because it requires so much more effort. Let's just look at the flip side. If you are going to replace just a piece of stone in a building like a scroll or window head and you were going to do it with cast stone, which is one material and the GFRC is very popular, glass fiber reinforced concrete, there are dozens of people that make this stuff in Brooklyn and the Bronx all over the city. I've actually seen people make it on site. I did a landmark in California and they had an old guy there that was so skilled. They could pull a piece of stone out and he had a shop set up in the building where he could make the piece and turn it around in a few days, because you're just making a mold of the piece.
Richard Koenigsberg: Terracotta is another animal. Like I said, it takes at least six months to get this piece made from the time you pull it out, so it takes years of learning from mistakes to be able to schedule all the work in such a way that you don't get slowed down. There's one building that I did about 10 years ago where the sidewalk shed was only up for two months. It was a hotel, famous hotel, The Burnham Hotel in Chicago, and we surveyed the building and we ordered all the terracotta ourself and we didn't have the sidewalk shed put up until they said the terracotta was going to be delivered in a couple of weeks, so nobody even knew that we did the job. Nobody even knew that this had a major job done, because we put the sidewalk shed up. We pulled out the terracotta right as we knew it was getting delivered. And the whole job turned around in three months. If somebody didn't have the experience to do that and they got on the building and they pulled out the pieces, they might have waited — that shed could have been up for a year.
Richard Koenigsberg: So my advice is while there are dozens of qualified engineers that know how to repair facades in New York, there are not that many that have ordered custom terracotta on dozens of buildings. If you know you're going to have to do that and they don't all need it. Every building doesn't need custom replication. If you have 10, 20 damaged pieces, you really want to push to fix those in place or take them out, repair them and reinstall them, because that first piece of terracotta is a bear. It could take two months just to get a color match going. I've told people, I always tell them, if you've ever made ceramic coffee cups at one of those clay places with your kids, you'll see that the color that you paint on the cup is nothing like it looks like after it goes through a kiln. So they go through the same thing with color matches.
Richard Koenigsberg: I've worked on more than 10 buildings that have white terracotta and the white is different on every single one. So if you have white terracotta, it might take you months and months to get the proper color match. They don't save them from year to year. They sort of seem to start over with every building. So again, that's something you want to know, you want to stay ahead and get your color matched quickly. But if you absolutely are going to need to replicate terracotta, you want someone that's done it a lot.
Carol Ott: And it sounds like if you've got terracotta, planning is crucial.
Richard Koenigsberg: Crucial getting ahead of it, because there're contractors that are going to say that they've done it and having a good contractor is also key, but you can do this. If you don't have the experience to do it and you're an experienced engineer and you know everything about repairing the building and you do it well, but you don't have the experience of the terracotta, you're going to get on the building and you might put a big red X on every piece that you want replicated. Then you're going to have to get bids from contractors and the contractor's going to pull the piece out. Then they're going to ship it to a fabricator, a vendor, and you've lost a lot of time and you also didn't get a competitive price.
Richard Koenigsberg: I've seen very few jobs where the engineers actually bid out the terracotta. They could simply bid out the job the way it's normally done to five, six, seven qualified contractors and tell the contractor they have to order the terracotta. Well, if you do that, the contractors are going to really mark that price up a lot because of uncertainty, so you might, as the engineer be able to assess, okay, I've got 500 bad pieces of terracotta. I'm going to bid this job out and I'm going to tell the contractor, they're going to have to go ahead and replace 500 pieces of terracotta. Well, the contractor doesn't know what that's going to cost. They're going to say, "Well, that might be 500 molds. I better ask for $500,000 fabrication, because I don't know how many molds I'm going to need." So if you have engineers that have worked with terracotta a lot, they make that bit a little bit better by telling you how many molds you need, how many pieces you need. And I try to go that extra step and I get the bids directly from the manufacturer. I like working with Gladding, McBean. Before that, I had done a lot of jobs with Boston Valley as well. I like taking control and working with them directly.
Carol Ott: Okay.
Richard Koenigsberg: It gets me a year ahead of it. I'm ordering the terracotta before the contractor's doing it, so that's the key. The key is to have somebody that's got specific experience ordering real terracotta. That's the single most important advice I could give.
Carol Ott: Terrific. Thank you so much, much appreciate this conversation. Thank you.
Richard Koenigsberg: Okay.