Performance expectations of early 20th 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, particulary 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 perfomance expectations of such foundations based on early 1900s’ building codes, practices, and testing data, with a typical upperbound of 10MPa in lime.