Residence, Atlanta, GA

Architect: Chris Legate
Structural Engineer: Runkle Consulting, Inc.

This was a rather difficult house to design structurally, it is long and narrow, and the inside is almost completely open. Also, it is cantilevered in the front. When designing a house or any other building structurally, you have to take into account wind loads. In a normal house, the interior walls provide significant bracing, and since most houses are not narrow like this one, the walls on all sides provide quite a bit of bracing. In this house, we have very little bracing from the front and back walls, and no bracing in the interior walls, so special framing had to be designed for the front and back walls to stabilize the house. The cantilever in the front made this difficult, and the large openings in the front and back made it hard also.

The true test of this structure came this spring when a small tornado touched down in the neighborhood. The house stood up under the high winds, and there is no visible structural stress. Note that there is no visible cracking in the stucco veneer.

The owner gave us permission to put the house on this website, but asked that we leave the address off, and his name to protect his privacy.

Atlanta Residence