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Correcting Killer Architecture
minstrelmike writes In Leeds, England, architects are adding a plethora of baffles and other structures to prevent the channeling of winds from a skyscraper that have pushed baby carriages into the street and caused one pedestrian death by blowing over a truck. Other architectural mistakes listed in the article include death ray buildings that can melt car bumpers and landscape ponds that blind tenants.
For any building of that size and cost, putting a model in a wind-tunnel should be compulsory.
Where I live, the absolute reverse is true. If any child can see that a storm will suck out the windows and smash them (just imagine what happens if you happen to be at or downwind of the landing spot), and you protest against the plans pointing that out, that protest is "not receivable".
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
Whatever about hipsters I'm certainly no fan of modern glass, concrete and steel spiderweb homogeneity. I mean you could take a building off the streets of just about any modern city and transplant it into another without anyone raising an eyebrow. Even the iconic ones are rarely that interesting, just more elaborate variations on the theme. Go back in time a little and enormous cultural variations can be found in architectural design, producing some marvellous and unique urbanscapes.
Still I suppose, at least it's not brutalism. *shudders*
What kind of modeling software do these guys use? On any high dollar project, I can't believe there isn't some serious CAD going on. The CAD programs should have packages that address these issues. Some of them will be unusual and it'll be a learning process; but nobody should build a car-melting building the second time.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
In the case of the 'death-ray' building they don't even have that excuse. The one in the UK was put up by the same architect who had already learned (by experience, not with 'math') that "Build a 50ish-story parabolic reflector in Las Vegas" might not be the best plan.
Maybe they can add on wind turbine to harvest this free energy?
This article reminds me of another English building with a concave mirror in it, that actually melted plastic parts of cars parked on the wrong spot at the wrong time by concentrating sunlight on it. http://geekologie.com/2013/09/...
Why not instead of baffles construct an array of wind turbines to take the energy out the wind? Fix the deadly gales problem and power the building at the same time.
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Other incidents have left a person with a torn liver and internal bleeding, and cuts requiring 11 stitches, as well as a buggy containing a three-month-old child being whisked out into the road by a sharp gust. Last year the council ruled that the surrounding roads must be closed when the wind reaches speeds of 45mph, but problems have continued.
The problem is that the government is not attaching enough cost to these kinds of mistakes, so they happen over and over again. If the building had to be torn down then the cost / loss would be so high that developers would never make mistakes like this again and start testing their designs better in advance. As it is right now, the only people paying the cost are the citizens while the developers laugh all the way to the bank.
Well, people keep asking for their flying cars, and now that they got them, thanks to that building in Leeds, they're upset?
Question for religious people: where do unrepentant masochists go when they die?
The architect designed in a solution to the death ray before the 'walkie talkie' was built.
The builders cut costs and didn't add the sunshades, so blame the builders and planning authority.
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Architects. Pfft.* Can modern architects stop inflicting ugly buildings on us, even if they didn't kill people? No one cares about your "theories". They look shit and often function shit. * Whoops, blew down my apartment building.
Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.
The problem with concrete is that it doesn't get enough love and attention, and dirty concrete does look terrible. Maybe in countries with less grime and rain its less of a problem than in the UK. Good clean concrete architecture is amazing though. Why do so many modern buildings hide their concrete and steel behind a skin of brick?
Anyway, get a load of F**k Yeah Brutalism for the best of it. Although a lot of it doesn't exist any more.
Monty Python predicted this, they also predicted how to fix this problem, that video is left as an exercise for the reader to find.
The Architect
If you had RTFA you would see that he specifically put sun sheilds in his design. They were "value engineered" out. Which means, as ever, it's the accountants and senior managers that deserve to die.
Don't anthropomorphize The Law, otherwise those killer inanimate constructions will rise out of their foundations and smack you silly.
Then there is the converse of a single building reflecting light. A lot of places fail to look at how many buildings work together to form dark urban canyons where light is blocked because of over building or bad planning. And canyons can turn into wind tunnels themselves. Granted this idea as a whole falls partially or mostly on urban planning, but still should be thought of when planning new individual buildings. Downtown Vancouver seems to be seeing some of this lack of meta planning in their Yaletown/West End neighbourhoods with their high rise condo boom. It might even be too late in places.
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1. fire artists
2. hire engineers
* How to Destroy a James Turrell
* The Towering Inferno: How Museum Tower threatens the Nasher Sculpture Center and the Woodall Rodgers roofdeck park, two of the most prized assets of the cityâ(TM)s vaunted Arts District.
Yes, architects are noticing - the D Magazine article got a partial reprint here:
* Controversy Surrounds Dallas' Museum Tower
I actually like the look of the AT&T Long Lines Building. I think the term is too all-encompassing, and that there needs to be more than one category when structures identified as Brutalist vary so significantly. Hell, even older Romanesque buildings could qualify based on the use of hard materials with few windows, but either way, comparing the Boston City Hall with the AT&T Long Lines Building one sees quite a difference.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
If your building can hurt people because non-architects can take away some nonstructural bolt-ons, then your building has a design fault.
Buildings are often modified as tastes change, if something is as simple to remove as these sun shields proved to be, then it's not unreasonable to assume that in the future, after the building is older and the purpose of the shields long-since forgotten, that someone would restyle the exterior and remove them, creating this problem again.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
If omitting something that's largely cosmetic turns the building in to a death-ray, then the design of the building is fundamentally flawed. Someone down the road migth decide to revitalize the building by removing the sun shields, which would spawn the problem all over again.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Someone never studied how shale and other rocks cleave...
Mind you, it's certainly desirable to stuy other forms of cleavage...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
If it makes me feel like I should be turning in my neighbours to earn extra food stamps or favours from the local Kommissar, maybe even the use of a People's Trabant to impress the other comrades, it's brutalism to me.
Go back in time a little and enormous cultural variations can be found in architectural design
Perhaps that says more about the reduction in cultural variances than changes in architectural design. Huge commercial skyscrapers dominate the skyline of globalized commercial centers around the world because globalized commercial centers share the same culture.
If omitting something that's largely cosmetic turns the building in to a death-ray, then the design of the building is fundamentally flawed.
By definition, the sunshades can not be largely cosmetic if they have this impact. It's like blaming building heat loss in winter after removing the largely cosmetic facade.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...
Inwards-facing ramps turned the 100M-square arch into a massive venturi, sweeping people off their feet, off the top of the plaza and then flinging therm down a conveniently-placed steep flight of hard stone stairs.
Genius.
Cue hastly rethink with a nasty plastic "roof" inside the arch to slow the wind...a little.
If it's not structural, it's cosmetic. As long as you adhere to weight and attachment limitations, the facade can be changed on a whim.
The horizon on water isn't actually straight. But you can bet it's where the idea came from.
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So we can remove all windows because they clearly aren't structural since the building will remain standing without any windows. Oh, the doors can go too since they clearly aren't structural.
Been watching old movies lately?
Take it easy, Charlie, I've got an Angle...
The only really structural part is the tenants belief in the building.
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Holding an architect responsible for such an unforeseeable event is unfair.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I heard a story about another "killer building" near Chicago. (Haven't checked the claims for truth - just repeating it as I heard it.)
Seems there was this nice commercial builing next to O'Hare Airport. Curved walls, lots of lawn, nice walkway up to the door in the middle. Great view through the space over the airport runways.
There was this one spot on the walkway where more than one person was found unconscious or dead of apparent heart failure. There were enough that somebody looked into the coincidences.
Turns out the building's curve was parabolic and it faced a runway. If you happened to be at the focus when a jet taking off crossed the axis, the building concentrated the sound of the engines on you...
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Seems to me that there is no reason to eschew buildings with exposed concrete just because many of them are butt ugly. One would think that by now past mistakes would have paved the way for better and more elegant designs. Perhaps not.
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Yes, and much of the most beautiful architecture that we revere so much was built with a lot of manual work by men (mostly) who were underpaid (if at all) and pretty much slaves to the monarchs who desired sumptuous palaces. Can't say I'd like for us to go back to that way of building. Certainly much of modern architecture is unforgivable, but that is not to say that all of it is.
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Speaking of Toronto, here in Canada we have this thing called "winter". Snow falls, sticks to buildings, turns to ice, and eventually falls off. This can be dangerous... http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/ame...
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Exactly. It's not like it takes special engineering to make sure your building is not a deathray. All you have to do is make it not a parabola.