Given all the bad press around things like the millennium tower, I think once you have an issue like this, the building is done. No one will want to live there. And given structural problems with load bearing beams, I would expect the building has to be demolished. But maybe they can demolish it top down partially and rebuild up from the compromised area if the city and engineers deem that safe.
Tie every helicopter you can find to the roof, gas the bent bit off, haul it away and drop it somewhere?
They'll likely shore it up with hydraulic props - probably going through the floor and ceiling to floor slabs above and below - to stabilise it, and then start demolishing the building bit by bit.
In that case the helicopters lower in the pecking order will chop off the strings for the higher ones. I thing seagulls is a better idea, if it worked for a giant peach it should work for a building. Plenty of those around and they'll work for peanuts.
Most likely the building gets stabilized and then anyone involved gets embroiled in lawsuits and it stays standing half finished for years. One Seaport is a famous recent example of an under construction skyscraper getting halted for structural issues. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/161_Maiden_Lane
They have something like that in San Francisco (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/301_Mission_Street) but they key to finishing it is to not tell anyone it's crooked until after you've sold all of the units.
I'm not an expert but those look like pretty wimpy columns? Kind of surprising, when I worked in a tower it had exposed concrete columns that were very thick in comparison
The USA is mostly empty space. Trying to force upwards in such an already dense area just doesn't make sense. We are not constrained the way singapore is.
It's illegal to build dense cities like Manhattan in most of the United States. And while most people want to live in a Manhattan'esque area, plenty (like me) do.
They're adding a hunch of floors to an existing building - it was the old Pfizer headquarters and they want to turn it into apartments. Someone either didn't do the proper engineering study, or the original specs weren't accurate.
Figuring out who to blame will probably take years in court.
More often than a faulty initial design, it's because of a something not being followed, e.g. the design called for one type of material or process and another was used during construction, either on accident or on purpose but without correctly doing the math to verify that it will work.
This makes a case for engineering margins, maybe even running the numbers assuming a worse grade of steel or bolts than specified. Also worth remembering this building wasn't special. If this was a design or construction flaw that surfaced with added load, a lot of other buildings from that era probably have a similar issue.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 27.4 ms ] threadThey'll likely shore it up with hydraulic props - probably going through the floor and ceiling to floor slabs above and below - to stabilise it, and then start demolishing the building bit by bit.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48820971
Beams are horizontal and columns are vertical.
They are buckling because the floors and ceilings are bending!
Scroll down and there is a picture of a much thicker support pillar, though still seems thin? Maybe just the context in frame doesn't do it justice.
Figuring out who to blame will probably take years in court.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1995/05/29/the-fifty-nine...