You’ve all seen the pictures (linked at the bottom of the post) of the spectacular building collapse in Shanghai. At around 5:30am on June 27, an unoccupied building still under construction at Lianhuanan Road in the Minhang district of Shanghai city toppled over. One worker was killed.
These figures show why the building collapsed. The images are from a Chinese newspaper and from the bbs.sina.com.cn website. The translations were forwarded to me in an email (Unfortunately, I can’t read Mandarin).
(1) An underground garage was being dug on the south side, to a depth of 4.6 meters
(2) The excavated dirt was being piled up on the north side, to a height of 10 meters
(3) The building experienced uneven lateral pressure from south and north
(4) This resulted in a lateral pressure of 3,000 tones, which was greater than why the pilings could tolerate. Thus the building toppled over in the southerly direction. Read more…
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china, collapse
Via Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat:
The year 2008 will long be remembered as the start of an economic crisis that has gripped the entire globe – a year that may also have brought to an abrupt end the worldwide construction boom of the past decade that has seen ever-denser cities containing ever-taller buildings proposed from Madrid to the Middle East, from Shanghai to San Francisco. As financial shock waves have reverberated around the world, high-profile tall building projects in virtually all skyscraper cities have been cancelled, delayed, or put on hold in response to the precarious global economic conditions. The question that everyone is now asking – is this the end of the tall ambitions of places such as Moscow, Chicago or Dubai for the short-mid term future?
The correlation between tall buildings and economic recession is not a new one. In 1999 the economist Andrew Lawrence created the ‘Skyscraper Index’ showing how almost all of the world’s tallest buildings throughout history have reached completion virtually simultaneously with the onset of a major economic recession. Using the research and criteria of the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH), and specifically their annual ’Ten Tallest Buildings Completed Annually’ and projected ‘Tallest 20 in 2020’ research, this paper seeks to examine further the link between skyscrapers and economic cycles, and suggest how the current economic crisis will affect tall building developments in the next decade or so.
(link to PDF of article)
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skyscrapers buildings
This was sent to ASCE members this morning:
Dear ASCE Member,
Infrastructure is receiving unprecedented attention from President-elect Obama, the U.S. Congress, and the media. ASCE finds itself at a crucial moment to spread our message and participate in the dialog regarding infrastructure improvements.
Yesterday, the House Appropriations Committee released a summary of the House Democratic Leadership’s proposed economic stimulus package, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Included in the infrastructure and science portions are many of ASCE’s priority issues. For details on the package, visit ASCE’s Government Relations blog.
On January 28, 2009, ASCE will issue important components of our 2009 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, including letter grades with short conditions summaries for each of 15 categories, solutions for infrastructure improvement, and an overall cost to improve the nation’s infrastructure. The nation’s leaders rely on ASCE to provide expert advice on the condition of the nation’s infrastructure. Early release of the 2009 Report Card is essential to fulfilling that role. Read more…
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ASCE, infrastructure, politics
We’ve seen these pictures forwarded to us by email and wondered if they were computer generated or photoshopped. Well, they’re not (via Snopes.com).
Aspire Magazine had a follow up article [pdf], where they discussed the repair work that resulted from this accident.
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accident, bridges, magazine
Has anyone seen the firsthand effects of outsourcing in the architecture/engineering industry? Of course we’ve been hearing about it for years in computers and IT, but this article from Businessweek suggests that it’s already begining for architects.
The article profiles Cadforce, a company out of California that has resources in India to help them with projects in the US. The company outsources the more time-consuming and technical tasks, such as creating blueprints from schematics, which allows their architects here to focus on design.
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business, offshoring
Reported in the Houston Chronicle (March 29, 2007)
Fears about the structural integrity of a burned-out six-story office building in which three people perished are keeping firefighters from entering today to see if any more victims remain in the ruins, officials said today.
While there were no reports of anyone missing, the firefighters were waiting for an engineer to give the green light to enter the building again. Its not clear in the article what’s keeping the engineers from making their evaluatlion. I assume they’re waiting for the fire to be put out, after which they could assess if the building is dangerous. Only after this assessment could the firefighters enter the building, room by room, to complete their search for victims.
This got me thinking about a FEMA-sponsored seminar on ATC-20, for rapid post-earthquake safety evaluations of buildings, that I attended a couple years ago. The idea was to equip engineers with a framework to do effective structural evaluations quickly following a disaster. While this fire wasn’t a widespread disaster, it highlights the role of structural engineers in the recovery, following an accident or disaster. For engineers who aren’t building inspectors everyday, but spend most of their time in a design setting, I think the ATC-20 course could be useful.
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fire
Via 