I talked with a guy who was on an upper floor of a hotel in San Francisco when the Loma Prieta quake hit. He said he was still clinging to the floor for dear life for about 10 minutes after it stopped. Even after the building stopped swaying wildly, it still felt like it was swaying wildly.
Tall buildings are flexible out of necessity. If they were not they would brake and fall down. Extremely discomforting during storms and earthquakes but better than the alternative.
Yeah that’s totally normal for a tall building to sway will the vibrations from the earthquake dissipate outwards. Not sure if there’s anything you can do to stop it completely however tall buildings tend to have significant stabilising elements in them to add rigidity to the structure
A big issue with Billionaires Row is so few people are actually living in the buildings. They are being bought as investments and safehavens, not as a residence.
@@DavidManouchehrishort term? yes, because of taxes. Long term? No, because it artificially raises the price of property, which forces people who would otherwise innovate to spend their time working to pay rent.
@@DavidManouchehri - No. Those unoccupied buildings aren't good for the city OR for taxes. They're mostly unoccupied, which means they're not generating any financial activity. There is also the issue of tax abatements and people using the empty real estate to claim residency when it benefits them and denying residency when it doesn't benefit them.
Ah the typical "if it not used then less maintance cost" completely missing the fact it is not being used therefore not generating money and cause property value to inflate to match the egos of people with too much money to care about anything, making the rest of the area unaffordable and not able to generate money. I pray that you are no where near real estate or economics because you clearly lack the crictal thinking skills for such professions as you would rather get quick money than constant money.@@DavidManouchehri
I don’t know the answer to this question, but if you were in an earthquake, prone area is attaching the building directly to bedrock the smart thing to do?
The developer saved money with the design of the foundation which was non standard for the location, rather than go with the standard foundation design for similar buildings in the area which all have pilings going down to bedrock. There were also some questions regarding why the city approved the design of the foundation. Bottom line is that the bottom line and money can easily override conservative building principles and safety.
Ah yes, The Walkie Scorchie, aka The Fryscraper. Who could possibly have guessed that building a gigantic concave mirror pointing in a southerly direction would have focussed sunlight sufficient to melt car interiors? Then you have The Shard which, at certain times of day, projects blinding beams of reflected sunlight straight into people’s kitchens on the other side of London. I have a civil engineer friend who lives in London and who is deeply annoyed by The Shard. Its tapering structure, which is mostly an aesthetic choice, reduces the available floorspace making it an inefficient design.
Eh, they're in London. The sun only shines bright enough 2 or 3 days a year for the ant-magnifying glass effect to take place. Besides I think I read that the crazy death ray created by the Walkie Talkie was only a couple parking spaces in size. Seriously though it was a pretty easy fix that was overblown, put some anti-reflective coating on certain glass windows.
When you mentioned wind effects, I thought for sure you were going to mention the John Hancock in Boston. Very famously started having windows pop out before completing construction, due to air pressure effects from the wind. I was at MIT across the river at the time and it was quite the spectacle. The architect (I. M. Pei) also had 3 buildings on the MIT campus which all had problems with wind, including one where initially you couldn't open the entry doors unless the wind was negligible.
@@spartancrownThe John Hancock Tower was the third highest building in Boston between 1976 and 2015, when Hancock moved out and the owners could no longer use that name. At the time of the glass problem in this video it most certainly was the John Hancock Tower. Your apology is accepted.😂
@@o2benaz just so we’re clear I was joking, buuuuut since we’re talking dates the Hancock tower in Chicago was finished in 68 at 1128ft tall and remained named the Hancock tower until 2018 so both before as well as after this feeble attempt of Bostons. 😂
This also applies when building outward, not upward. When I worked in an outdoor shopping district, we couldn’t open the door because it would swing open violently. It didn’t occur to the developers that you build a row of buildings crossing diagonally with an air current, it would push all the wind to the en. Enough wind to knock you off your feet, and sometimes enough to literally rip the door of its hinges.
If you're going to build a tall tower and aren't required to install piles to the bedrock I feel that should be grounds to sue the city that approved the permitting process. I'm not an engineer, I don't pretend to know much of anything about it. But even I know a tall AF building is basically a gravity powered self driving nail if it's sitting on "compacted" gravel, dirt, etc without a REAL foundation beneath it. I can't begin to do the math nor do I need to. It's self evident.
That makes sense. Probably a pain in the arse, especially for bigger fixes. It sucks that super tall buildings don't do their freaken job in allowing more people to live in a city for cheaper. I want to live in a city where there are connected skyscrapers, and you have everything you need in it. From a bakery, butcher, grocer, restaurants, etc. Have a Super Walmart in the underground or some shyte. Have myself a balcony too of course. Or a public larger deck. Would be awesome.
And how hard they are to evacuate in case of emergency like power outages or, oh, I don't know - maybe airplanes accidentally or intentionally flying into them???
@@dianapennepacker6854 The best way to do that is mixed use neighborhoods with midrises. Skyscrapers are just too inefficient - you need to waste a huge amount of floor space in skyscrapers for mechanical floors - you gotta pump water to the top if you want water at the top, which I presume you would, and pumping that water costs energy as well.
@@FNLNFNLNI can't believe I had to scroll this far for someone to mention the operational disadvantages. Absolutely right. You lose floor space the higher you build. There's clearly a sweet spot (given our current building technologies) and it seems to be somewhere at or below 50 stories. Let's be clear, still massive buildings, just not so massive that they start compromising usability for impressiveness
I used to work in a 900 foot building in Toronto. Three people died during the construction including two who where killed when the construction elevator hoist free fell. Late at night when there is a strong wind, you can hear the building sway. It is very creepy.
They built two (for Stockholm) very tall buildings right by where I live. The towers went extremely over time and the company almost went bankrupt as the towers were finished. Now one of the buildings is suing the company that built them because so many things are breaking already. Apparently they have sewage leaks all of the time. I would never want to move into a brand-new building because of stuff like this, but especially a skyscraper... Edit: oh, did I mention they had to install permanent cranes on the roof because otherwise they can't clean the windows? It looks super stupid.
This quick delivery and intense summary packs lots of data into a short and very engaging video. The quality of these videos is superb. When these structures are reviewed, I always think that we need not build so high. Rather like the moderate car I have outside on my drive, I seem surrounded by people, adverts, sporting events and people of power, which all enforce a policy of faster and more complex. It sells, it is the desire of those who 'talk loud', and clearly the dream of some, but is speed and fiddly extra bits really needed ? We have poor infrastructure, too few dwellings, and power and weather uncertainties, so should we be going deliberately down this 'precarious alley', when safe options are there for the taking ?
The word "hubris" comes to mind when I consider these massive architectural status symbols. The engineering solutions involved are definitely impressive and probably help advance building science in general. But it still seems (to me, at least) that there must be increased safety risks and potential breakdown in system, just because of the way the have to be built. In any I can say personally (having been in a number of them, including the World Trade Center) that their sheer height and cliff-like views can be downright terrifying (and I love views from high places). Can't imagine working in one every day! But I expect them just to get taller and taller - see "status symbol" above. That's just humans.
Damn that's insane. The last one could be causing earthquakes. I didn't even think that was possible. It certainly hammers home how complex these structures actually are.
While overall a great video, I just want to add a bit to the Citigroup Center. While it is true that a quartering winds could prove fatal for the building, it should be mentioned that it was the Construction company who altered the design to use bolted joints instead of welded joints as specified on the plan. And while the design company agreeded to the changes, they never informed William LeMessurier about these changes.
fun fact, the higher up you go the easier it is to also notice that part of the building begins to sway ever so slightly and can be rather unnerving. this is also why i probably will never want to live in a high rise.
Skyscrapers are designed with that sway in mind. They put tuned mass dampers in them, which is basically just a giant weight that shifts around as a counterbalance for the skyscraper and to help reduce the sway. There’s videos of them in action they’re crazy looking.
I noticed that when I was on the tip of the Eiffel tower. Spooky as hell going back and forth up at the top, but it's just awesome looking down on 20 story buildings.
Have any of these guys ever seen The Towering Inferno? That was a terrifying movie and when I started working for the fire marshal I found out that fire ladders only go to the 12th or 13th floor!
Why in the world would anyone want to live in a tall building? You have to go out the door, down the hallway, down the elevator, through the lobby, just to go outside. And if the buildings tall enough... there's sea sickness.
0:25 - I have been up the Burj Khalifa building twice, it has a reservation only luxury restaurant. Its lifts are also eerily quiet and very fast! Absolutely no G-force to feel whatsoever!
Your own screenshot of the article about LeMessurier and the Citi building mentions the problem stemmed from changes that were made to his plans, about which he had not been informed. As I recall, they contractors were supposed to use welding in the building’s construction, but someone told them to change to the cheaper, riveted construction. That’s what caused the building to be vulnerable to lower force winds, not a miscalculation on LeMessurier’s part. You’re accusing him of covering up a mistake he made, when it appears that he was trying to find a discreet solution for someone else’s lack of judgment.
I'm surprised that Simon didn't lead off with the original leaning tower of Pisa, Italy. For all of the disadvantages, immediate or discovered later, tall buildings are the triumph of ego over logic.
Emergency evacuation???? Could you imagine a building code allowing one of these laying on it's side with exits only at one end. No matter how good the engineering, the dangers are inherent
Just build higher until base jumping eventually becomes an option with a reasonable survival rate, stock parachutes for about half the people, since half of them will be closer to the top, and call it a day.
A good architect will use the limitations placed on them to drive their creativity. A bad architect will give the civil engineer their art project and have them figure out how to build it. It's actually why I hate deconstrutivisim architects because a lot of their buildings are leaky... 😒
I agree with this. I worked as a landscape gardener in London, UK for two years and what the designer allocates or decides is to be planted VS what the soil type is, where the coldest parts of the property are, where the gradients are going, where the water normally collects etc isn't really very thought of. Not always but frequently we would look at a planting plan to discover the designer didn't really have much of an idea of how their chosen specimines would survive....
I used to like them until DoNotEat01/WTYP showed how inefficient they are - the hugest cost, what messes up the equations, what wrecked the 'garden city' towers they made for the projects, is the maintenance for the elevators. 4-5 story's max is the way to go. Maybe one freight elevator for move in/out days. Then there is the carbon footprint of the building...
I think that up to a certain limit, its a practical use of limited land area but higher is no longer about practicality but about bragging :) You build super tall to impress and show off and people rent space there for the same reasons, so "better" really depends on your definition of better. If you are in it to show of, higher is going to be better, but if your in it for efficient use of land, there will be an upper limit where its just to expensive to be useful.
I don't know if this is mentioned in the video, but thought I'd add before i forget!!!! This qualifies as a WOW!!!! The Great Pyramid of Giza, stood as the tallest man made structure in the world ... for more than 4,000 years!!!
It's funny that they so often don't consider the height or even just sheer size problematic enough, so they feel like they have to push their luck by introducing other odd architectural aspects. And yeah, why not, leave small safety margins, and cheap out on safety here and there in general.
Another reason that Taipei 101 is so heavy is that there is a hug steel ball near the top that is suspended. It is part of the design to help stabilize the building in earthquakes. The 7.4 earthquake (known as 9.21 locally, because it happened on September 21) happened five years before 101 opened and while it was under construction. Quakes are the reason that Taipei has so few tall buildings compared to most large cities.
There are 2 limiting factors with tall buildings IN ADDITION to material sciences. Firstly, the elevator issue - the more floors the more elevators you need and the more elevators the bigger the footprint of wasted space for elevator shafts and or plazas to change elevators at. Secondly, diminishing returns - Every floor you add to the design adds more cost than the floor below (by increasing the necessary strength of lower floors and foundations, and requiring more pumps for water supply etc) eventually it would be cheaper to buy the land for another building than to add the floors the second building would contain.
Millenium Tower would have likely experienced the same outcome if it were shorter. The builders did not follow the engineer's recommended foundation design to cut costs. Millenium is also not a "Supertall" building at only 184m in height, "Supertall" buildings start at a height of 300m so I don't know why it's even included in this video...
I wonder/dread the day when we get to watch a super-tall building undergo the same fate as the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. That video will be in every sci-fi disaster movie for the next one hundred years.
Props for not making the intensely obvious phallic jokes that tend to accompany discussions of towers and other tall and relatively slender constructions. Fascinating about Taipei 101 causing quakes - didn't even know that was possible. Time to go look up tuned mass dampeners and such, because now the term is bugging me. I know what they are, I can't recall where I learned about them first or which buildings used them first, and my memory wants to insist Taipei 101 was among the first. And yet, I know good and damn well my memory is VERY faulty so off I go!
Yes I'm replying to my own comment, what of it - Taipei wasn't the first, but it WAS the heaviest for quite some time. AND, it was a show about that building where I first learned about the concept. So aha!
I'm surprised you didn't mention the elevator ratio: Let's say you're designing a skyscraper to hit some occupancy target, say 5K occupants. You need some number of floors to fit all those people, but you also need some elevators to service those floors. Elevators take up a lot of internal volume since they take up space on every floor. This means that for each elevator you add you have less usable room per floor, which means you need some additional floors, but this increases elevator travel times which means you need additional elevators, which means less space per floor, which means more floors, etc. What this means is that as you build taller and taller buildings a larger and larger percentage of the internal volume is 'wasted' on elevators. I read a comment from an architect stating that a 2km tall building would be impractical solely due to the elevator ratio. There are some things you can do to improve the ratio, like using double-decker elevators, or using a tiered elevator system: An 'express' elevator that only stops on every, say 10th floor, and 'local' elevators that can only travel from floors 0-9, 10-19, etc., but many of these solutions come with their own design complexities.
Fun fact: the higher you go up the more time elevators take, indeed, tall building have their own peak hour for elevator usage, if you live in the 50th floor for example, it could take you up to 15 minutes only to ride the elevator during peak hour
Quick note on the San Fransisco tower: you say it's built on sand, but the graphic shown says clay. Clay and sand are different materials, so which is it?
as a big fan of skyscrapers, sure, bigger isnt always better bc nothing is always better. there are always niches and many problems cannot be solved with money alone bc there isnt enough around. but 10-20 storey buildings are absolutely better than 1-3 storey buildings, like it's not even up for debate. i live in a very conservative country where you just couldnt build above that without a special permission. maybe with corruption, good connections or you yourself working for the government could pull some strings, but in general, people just grew up here and thought we lived in one massive swamp and that it just wasnt technologically feasible to build higher. turns out, as the largest city grew and became less and less conservative, they finally ALLOWED building higher. it was a very close vote and guess what, we've been experiencing a massive building boom of taller buildings. up till now cities spread two dimensionally, now finally we can also use the third dimension. it's ridiculous that it took so long bc education is high and incomes are even higher. this should not have been a debate, yet people were conservative and liked their small houses and buildings and also managed to complain about rural urbanisation due to cities spreading so fast but never upwards. to come back to my main point, literally every property owner is now thinking about replacing their small house with a much larger one, sometimes even fusing mutliple neighbouring properties. it's just smart. and it's not only the city center, one of the most expensive in the world, but also the working class districts, the museum district, the rich hillsides, along the rivers and lake, the (former) ghettos, the red light district, the (former) industrial districts...JUST. EVERYWHERE. i'd bet that the only reason a property owner isnt doing or thinking about this right now is conservatism ("i have my own lil house and it'll stay like that") or a lack of funds, bc eventhough our banks are strong, just this many people taking out their savings and applying for a mortgage does put a lot of strain on them, but luckily people around here are very good at paying off their debts keep in mind, we dont have any real skyscrapers in the whole country and none are planned or even under costruction. these are mostly just regular old high rise bricks to fill the market need asap. the entire region was hemorrhaging money and suffering from long commutes bc there were barely any tall buildings. it's like an entire city was built like a suburb
There was a movie 🎬 in the mid to late 70's called "The Towering Infernal" it showed the complexities, challenges of extremely tall buildings. Then in 2001 those fears coalesced when Tower 1 & 2 were hit
I understand another problem with tall buildings is that the taller they are the more elevators they need and the elevators take up to much floor space.
Or because they have the cash? Maybe they have huge dicks. Who cares. This is the most tired and unoriginal comment left any time someone without a personality sees a chance. Fast expensive car, must be a small dick. Because no usual guys like fast expensive cars? I worry you are giving yourself away with your projecting
I'm sixty years old. In that short time span I've seen my city continuously change. Buildings only 30 years old are demolished, new ones built, roads rerouted. closed, widened etc. This makes me wonder how viable (economically) very tall buildings are, how can they adapt to changes in the world. With remote working becoming more and more possible both technically and socially, why would a large portion of people want to life in a skyscraper? Give me a small village or a hut in the woods any time. It may well happen that although it seems that more and more people are drawn to cities that the cities themselves will (have to) change.
The 21st century has ruined any concept of amazement at a buildings height. The Empire State Building was STILL in the top 10 tallest buildings by the turn of the century. At this videos release it fell outside the top 50. The Chrysler Building was 18 in 2000… now it doesn’t even get a ranking. It’s more than that though, these tall buildings going up these days do not command the same aura of past buildings. I can’t even remember some of the buildings in the top ten I wanted to mention here.
I;m with ya, to me the 2 bldgs you mentioned were the very definition of the word skyscraper. Now the Chrysler is dwarfed by behemoths mere blocks away.
We should build a tower that's 1KM for the sake of it (even if not in North America) and have towers after that very rarely go into that range outside the Middle East and Asia. So far, Jeddah Tower is one of the few designs and the most well known one aiming for that height. Saudi Arabia is thinking about a 2KM tower in Riyadh; though I'm not sure how necessary one of that height for a long while will be. Then there's the Dubai Creek Tower that wants to compete with Jeddah tower. As for China, they want to construct the Phoenix Towers.
I had hoped the Leaning Tower of San Francisco would make the grade. I was pleasantly surprised when it was the lead story. Cheers Megaprojects from California, USA.
a note about the citicorp building flaw was that around the time LeMessurier became aware of it through Lee DeCarolis's qs, an architectural student named Diane Hartley discovered this flaw and wrote her thesis on it. But when she called attention to it to the building people, they assured her it wasn't an issue and she took them at their word
After 9/11I assumed that the age of the super tall skyscraper was over. I’m really surprised that not only did too-tall building not stop but they just keep getting higher. I for one would not want to live or work in one…a reversal of my youthful years (after Sandy I gave up ever wanting to live near the ocean too).
in San Francisco I believe bedrock was required for foundation for any building over 10 stories. how the Millennium towers' foundation got approved is still a big question. compared to other construction costs it really didn't save that much money, it only saved time..
How about a cube shaped building 90 stories tall? Imagine how much you would be able to fit inside of it. Also cube shaped buildings would take advantage of a wide base making them more stable. Thus avoiding problems like leaning on softer ground.
Although I'm saddened that New York, the capital of skyscrapers, has given up on building the tallest skyscrapers, I'm glad the Big Apple has transferred to building the so called super slims. These towers, although not the tallest, are incredibly slim, skinny if you want. This gives them an incredibly cool look and New York is definitely on the forefront of building this new class of skyscrapers.. P.S. I still hope some developer will try to bring back the title of the tallest building in the world back in NY.
Have often noticed how the alphabet often describes architectural designs or engineering tools. C-clamps and A frames being just 2 examples. Most very tall structures are built on the letter: i. They would be far more useful an safer if they were: upside down Us or Hs. Connecting two Us or Hs either at right angles or crossed in the center could make the buildings weigh less per sq. footprint and be much more stable and earthquake durable.
As an Architect, I can say there is absolutely no need for tall buildings other than ego. Because of computers and Zoom the need for tall building office space is even less.
There's so much unoccupied land that building skyscrapers have no sense. Also, giant parkings and roads have to be build to gather so many people in one place. Low storey towns are much more liveable
Beautiful until you are in the elevator stopping at every floor, or worse trying to make your way down the stairwell (see Ghostbusters and the Stairwell). That's why the 'epic' top floors that at first glance would seem to be the best for view, have issues. Plus it gets windy up there.
Concern about deaths of construction workers is very legitimate, but if we are trying to evaluate "better" or "worse," it is not the absolute number of deaths that matters, it is the number of deaths relative to those deaths from the same amount of construction required of less tall buildings to provide the same interior area.
The most desirable and classic densest cities on earth have 5 story buildings, with few to none over 50 floors. Paris Barcelona, even large swaths of NYC that aren't Midtown and lower Manhattan (thousands of 5 floor walk ups). Any building with small floor plates or so tapered that the top half is almost nothing, or even the bottom half having too much structural area with many stairways and elevators, is smaller than it looks. Notably the 828m Burj Khalifa is only 3 mil usable sq ft where many 400 meter square buildings are over 4 million sq ft. And that's less yet than a 10 story full block of historic mid rises with only narrow streets or walking alleys between them.
I've never understood the usefulness of sky-scrapers, except for apartments. Cause as an average consumer looking for goods or services, you aren't going to stop in front of a sky-scraper and say " Let me go up to the 35th floor of that building and see if they have what I need. Businesses have to be on the ground floor to be functional.
Every time I passed by the citigroup building I don't know how the hell that building is standing on something that looks like toothpicks are holding it up. I keep thinking to myself if a strong earth quake happens in NYC and that building starts to fall.
I talked with a guy who was on an upper floor of a hotel in San Francisco when the Loma Prieta quake hit. He said he was still clinging to the floor for dear life for about 10 minutes after it stopped. Even after the building stopped swaying wildly, it still felt like it was swaying wildly.
Tall buildings are flexible out of necessity. If they were not they would brake and fall down.
Extremely discomforting during storms and earthquakes but better than the alternative.
Yeah that’s totally normal for a tall building to sway will the vibrations from the earthquake dissipate outwards.
Not sure if there’s anything you can do to stop it completely however tall buildings tend to have significant stabilising elements in them to add rigidity to the structure
It probably was still swaying back and forth, just not as wildly.
A big issue with Billionaires Row is so few people are actually living in the buildings. They are being bought as investments and safehavens, not as a residence.
But it's very nice to jog through it, until you reach the ugly Russian embassy.
Isn’t that a good thing as it raises the city’s income (through taxation) and doesn’t impact infrastructure as much as a “normal” building?
@@DavidManouchehrishort term? yes, because of taxes. Long term? No, because it artificially raises the price of property, which forces people who would otherwise innovate to spend their time working to pay rent.
@@DavidManouchehri - No. Those unoccupied buildings aren't good for the city OR for taxes. They're mostly unoccupied, which means they're not generating any financial activity. There is also the issue of tax abatements and people using the empty real estate to claim residency when it benefits them and denying residency when it doesn't benefit them.
Ah the typical "if it not used then less maintance cost" completely missing the fact it is not being used therefore not generating money and cause property value to inflate to match the egos of people with too much money to care about anything, making the rest of the area unaffordable and not able to generate money.
I pray that you are no where near real estate or economics because you clearly lack the crictal thinking skills for such professions as you would rather get quick money than constant money.@@DavidManouchehri
Piled into sand. In a location known for earthquakes. Next to the ocean. Yep.. absolute genius.
I was thinking the same thing.
I don’t know the answer to this question, but if you were in an earthquake, prone area is attaching the building directly to bedrock the smart thing to do?
@@extragoogleaccount6061 there's this other thing called liquefaction. There's some really cool photos on Google.
The developer saved money with the design of the foundation which was non standard for the location, rather than go with the standard foundation design for similar buildings in the area which all have pilings going down to bedrock. There were also some questions regarding why the city approved the design of the foundation. Bottom line is that the bottom line and money can easily override conservative building principles and safety.
While not a supertall tower by any means, the Walkie Talkie in London was a hilariously dangerous structure.
Ah yes, The Walkie Scorchie, aka The Fryscraper. Who could possibly have guessed that building a gigantic concave mirror pointing in a southerly direction would have focussed sunlight sufficient to melt car interiors?
Then you have The Shard which, at certain times of day, projects blinding beams of reflected sunlight straight into people’s kitchens on the other side of London.
I have a civil engineer friend who lives in London and who is deeply annoyed by The Shard. Its tapering structure, which is mostly an aesthetic choice, reduces the available floorspace making it an inefficient design.
Eh, they're in London. The sun only shines bright enough 2 or 3 days a year for the ant-magnifying glass effect to take place. Besides I think I read that the crazy death ray created by the Walkie Talkie was only a couple parking spaces in size. Seriously though it was a pretty easy fix that was overblown, put some anti-reflective coating on certain glass windows.
@@GorgeDawes Seems the people designing these horrible structures, think that sun shines out of their ar....er...posteriors.
What? You could use it to cook eggs outside.
When you mentioned wind effects, I thought for sure you were going to mention the John Hancock in Boston. Very famously started having windows pop out before completing construction, due to air pressure effects from the wind. I was at MIT across the river at the time and it was quite the spectacle. The architect (I. M. Pei) also had 3 buildings on the MIT campus which all had problems with wind, including one where initially you couldn't open the entry doors unless the wind was negligible.
Lies. There’s only one Hancock building and it’s in Chicago. 😉
@@spartancrownThe John Hancock Tower was the third highest building in Boston between 1976 and 2015, when Hancock moved out and the owners could no longer use that name. At the time of the glass problem in this video it most certainly was the John Hancock Tower. Your apology is accepted.😂
@@o2benaz just so we’re clear I was joking, buuuuut since we’re talking dates the Hancock tower in Chicago was finished in 68 at 1128ft tall and remained named the Hancock tower until 2018 so both before as well as after this feeble attempt of Bostons. 😂
You all are a bunch of nerds.😂
This also applies when building outward, not upward. When I worked in an outdoor shopping district, we couldn’t open the door because it would swing open violently. It didn’t occur to the developers that you build a row of buildings crossing diagonally with an air current, it would push all the wind to the en. Enough wind to knock you off your feet, and sometimes enough to literally rip the door of its hinges.
If you're going to build a tall tower and aren't required to install piles to the bedrock I feel that should be grounds to sue the city that approved the permitting process.
I'm not an engineer, I don't pretend to know much of anything about it. But even I know a tall AF building is basically a gravity powered self driving nail if it's sitting on "compacted" gravel, dirt, etc without a REAL foundation beneath it. I can't begin to do the math nor do I need to. It's self evident.
The BUrj Kalifa doesn't rest on bedrock and its working. THe friction stuff can work but not in all circumstances
Always great to see another MegaProjects video, love your work Simon.
This didn't even take into account how much more difficult and expensive maintenance is in tall buildings
That makes sense. Probably a pain in the arse, especially for bigger fixes.
It sucks that super tall buildings don't do their freaken job in allowing more people to live in a city for cheaper.
I want to live in a city where there are connected skyscrapers, and you have everything you need in it. From a bakery, butcher, grocer, restaurants, etc.
Have a Super Walmart in the underground or some shyte.
Have myself a balcony too of course. Or a public larger deck.
Would be awesome.
And how hard they are to evacuate in case of emergency like power outages or, oh, I don't know - maybe airplanes accidentally or intentionally flying into them???
@@dianapennepacker6854 The best way to do that is mixed use neighborhoods with midrises.
Skyscrapers are just too inefficient - you need to waste a huge amount of floor space in skyscrapers for mechanical floors - you gotta pump water to the top if you want water at the top, which I presume you would, and pumping that water costs energy as well.
@@FNLNFNLNI can't believe I had to scroll this far for someone to mention the operational disadvantages. Absolutely right. You lose floor space the higher you build. There's clearly a sweet spot (given our current building technologies) and it seems to be somewhere at or below 50 stories. Let's be clear, still massive buildings, just not so massive that they start compromising usability for impressiveness
If u could find a developer land which cost 1/100 of what they do in city centres then perhaps it's necessary to build as tall to recoup the costs?
I used to work in a 900 foot building in Toronto. Three people died during the construction including two who where killed when the construction elevator hoist free fell. Late at night when there is a strong wind, you can hear the building sway. It is very creepy.
They built two (for Stockholm) very tall buildings right by where I live. The towers went extremely over time and the company almost went bankrupt as the towers were finished. Now one of the buildings is suing the company that built them because so many things are breaking already. Apparently they have sewage leaks all of the time. I would never want to move into a brand-new building because of stuff like this, but especially a skyscraper...
Edit: oh, did I mention they had to install permanent cranes on the roof because otherwise they can't clean the windows? It looks super stupid.
This quick delivery and intense summary packs lots of data into a short and very engaging video. The quality of these videos is superb.
When these structures are reviewed, I always think that we need not build so high. Rather like the moderate car I have outside on my drive, I seem surrounded by people, adverts, sporting events and people of power, which all enforce a policy of faster and more complex. It sells, it is the desire of those who 'talk loud', and clearly the dream of some, but is speed and fiddly extra bits really needed ?
We have poor infrastructure, too few dwellings, and power and weather uncertainties, so should we be going deliberately down this 'precarious alley', when safe options are there for the taking ?
The word "hubris" comes to mind when I consider these massive architectural status symbols. The engineering solutions involved are definitely impressive and probably help advance building science in general. But it still seems (to me, at least) that there must be increased safety risks and potential breakdown in system, just because of the way the have to be built. In any I can say personally (having been in a number of them, including the World Trade Center) that their sheer height and cliff-like views can be downright terrifying (and I love views from high places). Can't imagine working in one every day! But I expect them just to get taller and taller - see "status symbol" above. That's just humans.
The Tower of Babel.
You also have to remember these buildings take far more material to achieve the same amount of floor space a two or three Storey building would need
Damn that's insane. The last one could be causing earthquakes. I didn't even think that was possible. It certainly hammers home how complex these structures actually are.
its more the weight ie pounds per square inch. i guess a big solid stone pyramid would upset the earth?
While overall a great video, I just want to add a bit to the Citigroup Center. While it is true that a quartering winds could prove fatal for the building, it should be mentioned that it was the Construction company who altered the design to use bolted joints instead of welded joints as specified on the plan. And while the design company agreeded to the changes, they never informed William LeMessurier about these changes.
TH-cam channel Building Integrity has a series of videos about Millennium Tower, I can heartily recommend those and the channel overall.
fun fact, the higher up you go the easier it is to also notice that part of the building begins to sway ever so slightly and can be rather unnerving. this is also why i probably will never want to live in a high rise.
Skyscrapers are designed with that sway in mind. They put tuned mass dampers in them, which is basically just a giant weight that shifts around as a counterbalance for the skyscraper and to help reduce the sway. There’s videos of them in action they’re crazy looking.
I noticed that when I was on the tip of the Eiffel tower. Spooky as hell going back and forth up at the top, but it's just awesome looking down on 20 story buildings.
This is a terrifying feeling, I have nightmares about this
wow, getting 'seasick' in a building. Sounds fun! not. High rises in Japan are designed to sway because it's better than the alternative.
Have any of these guys ever seen The Towering Inferno? That was a terrifying movie and when I started working for the fire marshal I found out that fire ladders only go to the 12th or 13th floor!
Or the 10am news on September 11, 2001.
I love that movie. Also set in San Francisco. They could have done a tie-in with the other disaster movie, Earthquake
Would love to see an episode on catastrophic failures like the Tay Firth Railroad Bridge or I35 in Minneapolis-St. Paul.
I freaking love your megaprojects vids!
It's so wild to see humankind's endeavors to do wild things
Great video, that's a fascinating topic.
I could never live in such a tall building tbh, and I'm not afraid of heights.
I am not a fan of skyscrapers, but I live in So.Cal. The ground shakes here.
Very good video, thanks.
Another great video Simon! You are my favorite documentary video maker and I always eagerly await your next video.
Thanks!
Why in the world would anyone want to live in a tall building? You have to go out the door, down the hallway, down the elevator, through the lobby, just to go outside. And if the buildings tall enough... there's sea sickness.
0:25 - I have been up the Burj Khalifa building twice, it has a reservation only luxury restaurant.
Its lifts are also eerily quiet and very fast!
Absolutely no G-force to feel whatsoever!
Your own screenshot of the article about LeMessurier and the Citi building mentions the problem stemmed from changes that were made to his plans, about which he had not been informed. As I recall, they contractors were supposed to use welding in the building’s construction, but someone told them to change to the cheaper, riveted construction. That’s what caused the building to be vulnerable to lower force winds, not a miscalculation on LeMessurier’s part. You’re accusing him of covering up a mistake he made, when it appears that he was trying to find a discreet solution for someone else’s lack of judgment.
Talking of tall buildings, the deeper the hole you need to build before ❤
Handsome bearded guy...thanks for all the videos...ur narration style and research and the fact that I never found a boring episode
I'm surprised that Simon didn't lead off with the original leaning tower of Pisa, Italy.
For all of the disadvantages, immediate or discovered later, tall buildings are the triumph of ego over logic.
Emergency evacuation???? Could you imagine a building code allowing one of these laying on it's side with exits only at one end. No matter how good the engineering, the dangers are inherent
Invest in a jetpack
Just build higher until base jumping eventually becomes an option with a reasonable survival rate, stock parachutes for about half the people, since half of them will be closer to the top, and call it a day.
zip lines@@devin19222
As a structural engineer, I cant fucking STAND architects sometimes.
I love you, simon. you and your teams work is always phenomenal.
Here's a scratch I needed an itch for: I've solved the vaulted elevator problem.
As an architect, I can't stand architects many times 😅
Not true architects any more than someone with a game idea/concept is a game designer.
A good architect will use the limitations placed on them to drive their creativity. A bad architect will give the civil engineer their art project and have them figure out how to build it. It's actually why I hate deconstrutivisim architects because a lot of their buildings are leaky... 😒
I agree with this. I worked as a landscape gardener in London, UK for two years and what the designer allocates or decides is to be planted VS what the soil type is, where the coldest parts of the property are, where the gradients are going, where the water normally collects etc isn't really very thought of. Not always but frequently we would look at a planting plan to discover the designer didn't really have much of an idea of how their chosen specimines would survive....
Watching these videos and reading these comments while remaining engaged and focused is precisely the type out entertainment I crave.
Thank you!
I used to like them until DoNotEat01/WTYP showed how inefficient they are - the hugest cost, what messes up the equations, what wrecked the 'garden city' towers they made for the projects, is the maintenance for the elevators. 4-5 story's max is the way to go. Maybe one freight elevator for move in/out days. Then there is the carbon footprint of the building...
I think that up to a certain limit, its a practical use of limited land area but higher is no longer about practicality but about bragging :)
You build super tall to impress and show off and people rent space there for the same reasons, so "better" really depends on your definition of better.
If you are in it to show of, higher is going to be better, but if your in it for efficient use of land, there will be an upper limit where its just to expensive to be useful.
I don't know if this is mentioned in the video, but thought I'd add before i forget!!!! This qualifies as a WOW!!!!
The Great Pyramid of Giza, stood as the tallest man made structure in the world ... for more than 4,000 years!!!
It's funny that they so often don't consider the height or even just sheer size problematic enough, so they feel like they have to push their luck by introducing other odd architectural aspects. And yeah, why not, leave small safety margins, and cheap out on safety here and there in general.
I discovered another one of your channels today called, Places. Genuinely were do you get the time
He has a production team. If I recall correctly, he's setup somewhere in Eastern Europe, which has labor cost advantages as well.
Another reason that Taipei 101 is so heavy is that there is a hug steel ball near the top that is suspended. It is part of the design to help stabilize the building in earthquakes. The 7.4 earthquake (known as 9.21 locally, because it happened on September 21) happened five years before 101 opened and while it was under construction. Quakes are the reason that Taipei has so few tall buildings compared to most large cities.
Taller isn’t always better, but it’s DEFINITELY always cooler.
which is why NY is full of pencil towers nowadays
@@monad_tcp and I hate it.
Saith James Howell (1621): Tall men are like houses of four stories, wherein commonly the uppermost room is worst furnished.
@@monad_tcp Amazing that buildings are getting skinnier while people are getting fatter.
There are 2 limiting factors with tall buildings IN ADDITION to material sciences. Firstly, the elevator issue - the more floors the more elevators you need and the more elevators the bigger the footprint of wasted space for elevator shafts and or plazas to change elevators at. Secondly, diminishing returns - Every floor you add to the design adds more cost than the floor below (by increasing the necessary strength of lower floors and foundations, and requiring more pumps for water supply etc) eventually it would be cheaper to buy the land for another building than to add the floors the second building would contain.
Heresy, if we aren't scraping the top of the atmosphere, then how are we supposed to do hive cities by the year 30k?
Millenium Tower would have likely experienced the same outcome if it were shorter. The builders did not follow the engineer's recommended foundation design to cut costs. Millenium is also not a "Supertall" building at only 184m in height, "Supertall" buildings start at a height of 300m so I don't know why it's even included in this video...
he put it in because it such a failure
I wonder/dread the day when we get to watch a super-tall building undergo the same fate as the Tacoma Narrows Bridge.
That video will be in every sci-fi disaster movie for the next one hundred years.
Round buildings have less problems with wind because it bends around it instead of hitting it square on
Props for not making the intensely obvious phallic jokes that tend to accompany discussions of towers and other tall and relatively slender constructions.
Fascinating about Taipei 101 causing quakes - didn't even know that was possible.
Time to go look up tuned mass dampeners and such, because now the term is bugging me. I know what they are, I can't recall where I learned about them first or which buildings used them first, and my memory wants to insist Taipei 101 was among the first. And yet, I know good and damn well my memory is VERY faulty so off I go!
Yes I'm replying to my own comment, what of it -
Taipei wasn't the first, but it WAS the heaviest for quite some time. AND, it was a show about that building where I first learned about the concept. So aha!
Fudd's first theory of opposition: If you push something hard enough, it will fall over. (Firesign Theatre)
It comes in; it must go out - Testicles’ Deviant to Fudd’s Law.
I'm surprised you didn't mention the elevator ratio: Let's say you're designing a skyscraper to hit some occupancy target, say 5K occupants. You need some number of floors to fit all those people, but you also need some elevators to service those floors. Elevators take up a lot of internal volume since they take up space on every floor. This means that for each elevator you add you have less usable room per floor, which means you need some additional floors, but this increases elevator travel times which means you need additional elevators, which means less space per floor, which means more floors, etc. What this means is that as you build taller and taller buildings a larger and larger percentage of the internal volume is 'wasted' on elevators. I read a comment from an architect stating that a 2km tall building would be impractical solely due to the elevator ratio.
There are some things you can do to improve the ratio, like using double-decker elevators, or using a tiered elevator system: An 'express' elevator that only stops on every, say 10th floor, and 'local' elevators that can only travel from floors 0-9, 10-19, etc., but many of these solutions come with their own design complexities.
Fun fact: the higher you go up the more time elevators take, indeed, tall building have their own peak hour for elevator usage, if you live in the 50th floor for example, it could take you up to 15 minutes only to ride the elevator during peak hour
Another reason the tallest buildings are luxury buildings. More space per person means a lower portion is spent on elevators.
You should do one on Chinese rail transit aka the irt
I remember when the Sears Tower in Chicago was the tallest building in the world. Was for like 20 years
Empire State Bldg in NYC was the tallest for 40.
Quick note on the San Fransisco tower: you say it's built on sand, but the graphic shown says clay. Clay and sand are different materials, so which is it?
as a big fan of skyscrapers, sure, bigger isnt always better bc nothing is always better. there are always niches and many problems cannot be solved with money alone bc there isnt enough around. but 10-20 storey buildings are absolutely better than 1-3 storey buildings, like it's not even up for debate. i live in a very conservative country where you just couldnt build above that without a special permission. maybe with corruption, good connections or you yourself working for the government could pull some strings, but in general, people just grew up here and thought we lived in one massive swamp and that it just wasnt technologically feasible to build higher. turns out, as the largest city grew and became less and less conservative, they finally ALLOWED building higher. it was a very close vote and guess what, we've been experiencing a massive building boom of taller buildings. up till now cities spread two dimensionally, now finally we can also use the third dimension. it's ridiculous that it took so long bc education is high and incomes are even higher. this should not have been a debate, yet people were conservative and liked their small houses and buildings and also managed to complain about rural urbanisation due to cities spreading so fast but never upwards. to come back to my main point, literally every property owner is now thinking about replacing their small house with a much larger one, sometimes even fusing mutliple neighbouring properties. it's just smart. and it's not only the city center, one of the most expensive in the world, but also the working class districts, the museum district, the rich hillsides, along the rivers and lake, the (former) ghettos, the red light district, the (former) industrial districts...JUST. EVERYWHERE. i'd bet that the only reason a property owner isnt doing or thinking about this right now is conservatism ("i have my own lil house and it'll stay like that") or a lack of funds, bc eventhough our banks are strong, just this many people taking out their savings and applying for a mortgage does put a lot of strain on them, but luckily people around here are very good at paying off their debts
keep in mind, we dont have any real skyscrapers in the whole country and none are planned or even under costruction. these are mostly just regular old high rise bricks to fill the market need asap. the entire region was hemorrhaging money and suffering from long commutes bc there were barely any tall buildings. it's like an entire city was built like a suburb
Could y'all go through the building of the Bugatti Veyron? It's actually a freaking amazing creation and what it meant for the automotive industry?
Another awesome video! Great job!
The easiest way to manage your money is to take it one step at a time and not worry about being perfect😊
After meeting Mr James in the United States, my life changed completely. Yours can change too, it's just a matter of commitment and focus.
I wonder if that applies to planks on pirate ships?🏴☠
Why was money invented? Can someone explain to me?
Either we love super tall buildings... or just you Simon. Absolute legend.
There was a movie 🎬 in the mid to late 70's called "The Towering Infernal" it showed the complexities, challenges of extremely tall buildings. Then in 2001 those fears coalesced when Tower 1 & 2 were hit
Inferno.
Yeah, I hate auto correct.
As a man of 5’ 1” (155cm) I’m happy to hear that taller isn’t always better. 😂
It'd be better to find the most efficient building height instead of the most impressive.
I understand another problem with tall buildings is that the taller they are the more elevators they need and the elevators take up to much floor space.
Rich guys use buildings for their measuring contests ;-)
Or because they have the cash? Maybe they have huge dicks. Who cares. This is the most tired and unoriginal comment left any time someone without a personality sees a chance.
Fast expensive car, must be a small dick. Because no usual guys like fast expensive cars? I worry you are giving yourself away with your projecting
So which is better, for it to be taller or wider?
Taller 100%
I would. Doesn't matter how big your duck is, it isn't half a mile tall
@@eskamobob8662 my duck is huge but got ate by a raccoon...
Many years ago I had a book naming the large Dams being made around, a factor during earthquakes, because of the added weight!
Any chance of a Mega Project on the Doomsday Plane?✈️ love all these videos, great stuff Simon and team.
I'm sixty years old. In that short time span I've seen my city continuously change. Buildings only 30 years old are demolished, new ones built, roads rerouted. closed, widened etc. This makes me wonder how viable (economically) very tall buildings are, how can they adapt to changes in the world. With remote working becoming more and more possible both technically and socially, why would a large portion of people want to life in a skyscraper? Give me a small village or a hut in the woods any time. It may well happen that although it seems that more and more people are drawn to cities that the cities themselves will (have to) change.
Great video Simon
we just need more super tall buildings near the tall ones with sky bridges
Or zip lines and parachutes.
The 21st century has ruined any concept of amazement at a buildings height. The Empire State Building was STILL in the top 10 tallest buildings by the turn of the century. At this videos release it fell outside the top 50. The Chrysler Building was 18 in 2000… now it doesn’t even get a ranking.
It’s more than that though, these tall buildings going up these days do not command the same aura of past buildings. I can’t even remember some of the buildings in the top ten I wanted to mention here.
I;m with ya, to me the 2 bldgs you mentioned were the very definition of the word skyscraper. Now the Chrysler is dwarfed by behemoths mere blocks away.
1:20 - Chapter 1 - The leaning tower of san francisco
4:20 - Chapter 2 - The lotte world tower human cost
6:05 - Chapter 3 - Disaster averted at citicorp center
8:15 - Chapter 4 - Shanghai ghost tower
9:55 - Chapter 5 - Taipei 101's tremors
Thanks a bunch! 👍🏼
Skyscrapers, 20th century technology, we still build them, but we moved on to college type campuses.Taking more room, but then again we have the room.
So crazy that I watched this from the building in Shanghai. Feels meta.
We should build a tower that's 1KM for the sake of it (even if not in North America) and have towers after that very rarely go into that range outside the Middle East and Asia.
So far, Jeddah Tower is one of the few designs and the most well known one aiming for that height. Saudi Arabia is thinking about a 2KM tower in Riyadh; though I'm not sure how necessary one of that height for a long while will be. Then there's the Dubai Creek Tower that wants to compete with Jeddah tower. As for China, they want to construct the Phoenix Towers.
I had hoped the Leaning Tower of San Francisco would make the grade. I was pleasantly surprised when it was the lead story.
Cheers Megaprojects from California, USA.
a note about the citicorp building flaw was that around the time LeMessurier became aware of it through Lee DeCarolis's qs, an architectural student named Diane Hartley discovered this flaw and wrote her thesis on it.
But when she called attention to it to the building people, they assured her it wasn't an issue and she took them at their word
The Lotte tower certainly seems like the issues were all about careless work conditions rather than issues with the height itself
After 9/11I assumed that the age of the super tall skyscraper was over. I’m really surprised that not only did too-tall building not stop but they just keep getting higher. I for one would not want to live or work in one…a reversal of my youthful years (after Sandy I gave up ever wanting to live near the ocean too).
OMG have y'all done an episode on Galloping Gertie yet?
He is one example of a building to declare building beers and always better. The two are totally unconnected.
in San Francisco I believe bedrock was required for foundation for any building over 10 stories.
how the Millennium towers' foundation got approved is still a big question.
compared to other construction costs it really didn't save that much money, it only saved time..
“The engineer retreated to his main summer house to think”. Anybody else catch that subtle flex lol
Great video!
Finally a video starting with the Ulmer Münster.
Diane Hartley was the original person to discover the Citigroup building issue.
There was no mention of elevator traffic as the taller the building is the more you have to wait for elevator cars to be available.
How about a cube shaped building 90 stories tall? Imagine how much you would be able to fit inside of it. Also cube shaped buildings would take advantage of a wide base making them more stable. Thus avoiding problems like leaning on softer ground.
I hear construction on the Jeddah Tower has resumed...
Although I'm saddened that New York, the capital of skyscrapers, has given up on building the tallest skyscrapers, I'm glad the Big Apple has transferred to building the so called super slims. These towers, although not the tallest, are incredibly slim, skinny if you want. This gives them an incredibly cool look and New York is definitely on the forefront of building this new class of skyscrapers.. P.S. I still hope some developer will try to bring back the title of the tallest building in the world back in NY.
Have often noticed how the alphabet often describes architectural designs or engineering tools. C-clamps and A frames being just 2 examples.
Most very tall structures are built on the letter: i. They would be far more useful an safer if they were: upside down Us or Hs. Connecting two Us or Hs either at right angles or crossed in the center could make the buildings weigh less per sq. footprint and be much more stable and earthquake durable.
Art Vandelay wouldve seen the issues before these projects wouldve even broke ground.
As an Architect, I can say there is absolutely no need for tall buildings other than ego. Because of computers and Zoom the need for tall building office space is even less.
There's so much unoccupied land that building skyscrapers have no sense. Also, giant parkings and roads have to be build to gather so many people in one place.
Low storey towns are much more liveable
Beautiful until you are in the elevator stopping at every floor, or worse trying to make your way down the stairwell (see Ghostbusters and the Stairwell). That's why the 'epic' top floors that at first glance would seem to be the best for view, have issues. Plus it gets windy up there.
I like being close to the ground. This was like an episode of a horror series for me.
Not a fan, myself. Don't mind snakes, spiders, drop bears, crocks, or whatever, but a big 'noop' to tall buildings. Six floors is plenty?
"We will build towers to the heavens."
"Man was not built for such a height."
Concern about deaths of construction workers is very legitimate, but if we are trying to evaluate "better" or "worse," it is not the absolute number of deaths that matters, it is the number of deaths relative to those deaths from the same amount of construction required of less tall buildings to provide the same interior area.
They have their place. And not every building needs to be practical
Aquapher deletion from water usage like drinking water may be causing this like Mexico city
The most desirable and classic densest cities on earth have 5 story buildings, with few to none over 50 floors. Paris Barcelona, even large swaths of NYC that aren't Midtown and lower Manhattan (thousands of 5 floor walk ups). Any building with small floor plates or so tapered that the top half is almost nothing, or even the bottom half having too much structural area with many stairways and elevators, is smaller than it looks. Notably the 828m Burj Khalifa is only 3 mil usable sq ft where many 400 meter square buildings are over 4 million sq ft. And that's less yet than a 10 story full block of historic mid rises with only narrow streets or walking alleys between them.
I've never understood the usefulness of sky-scrapers, except for apartments. Cause as an average consumer looking for goods or services, you aren't going to stop in front of a sky-scraper and say " Let me go up to the 35th floor of that building and see if they have what I need. Businesses have to be on the ground floor to be functional.
Every time I passed by the citigroup building I don't know how the hell that building is standing on something that looks like toothpicks are holding it up. I keep thinking to myself if a strong earth quake happens in NYC and that building starts to fall.
Please please please never stop ❤