Service Area
Construction Monitoring and Special Inspections in Brooklyn
Much of Brooklyn is built as continuous rows of houses, so a new foundation usually means digging a few feet from somebody's parlor floor. Enthink Engineering provides the surveys, instruments, and inspections that kind of work calls for.
Monitoring next to rowhouses and brownstones
Rowhouses share walls, and that sharing is the whole reason monitoring exists on these sites. Excavation next to a shared party wall changes the conditions that the wall has leaned on for a century, and the response is usually gradual rather than dramatic, which is precisely why it has to be measured instead of watched.
The sequence we follow runs in a fixed order. Pre-construction survey: the documented condition of each adjacent building, recorded with interior and exterior photographs. Monitoring plan: the number and location of monitors together with the specific limits they are read against, written by us if the engineer of record did not issue one. Vibration monitoring: continuous comparison of readings to those thresholds, with reduced limits wherever a landmark building is involved. Optical and settlement monitoring: an instrument shoots prisms fixed to the neighboring buildings so elevation change is tracked numerically. Crack monitoring: applied where the survey located cracks to begin with. A post-construction survey is carried out on request once the work is finished.
Historic districts and lower limits
Designated rows and individual landmarks are scattered across the borough, sometimes facing a site directly and sometimes sitting one house away. Because designation lowers the vibration limit, the practical effect is a narrower band for the contractor to operate inside, and a monitoring plan that has to state clearly which building answers to which number.
Special inspections on Brooklyn filings
Responsibility for the inspection list sits with the engineer or applicant of record, who identifies what the job requires. The contractor then calls us to carry those inspections out. TR1 items are structural steel, fire-related, mechanical, and plumbing; TR8 is energy code compliance. Details of both live on our special inspections service.
Renovation, repair, and protective structures
Plenty of Brooklyn work is not new construction at all. We prepare structural assessment and repair drawings, fire damage among the usual reasons, and we take on structural design for smaller renovations and repairs. Contractors also come to us for the drawings and filings behind fences, sidewalk sheds, scaffolding, and facade repairs. Tell us what stage your job is at through our quote form and we will point you to the right scope.