Good luck coming up with an efficient design and not having buildings fall down.

Your saving grace,
Structural Engineers.

Dang. Well as long as you love it man. That's the best position to be in.

I was just joking dude.

The architect signs off his part of the design... finishes, floor plans, egress, fire protection.

The structural engineer signs off his part... columns, foundations, beams (things that actually make a building safe).

They never sign off on the same items.

I know... architects know they need us.

and most engineers know we need architects... even if they are a pain in the ass at times.

Architectural design trends and artistic tastes. My understanding of it since the bridge itself was designed by famous New York bridge engineer Leon Moisseiff, that it was at the time the call for a certain style of aesthetic architecture. His design was influenced by architecture at the time that was meant to include terms such as graceful, elegant, slender, and lean feminine type of architecture.

This type of design is what influenced the call for minimal girders and contributed to its actual failure. I know architecture and engineering run together a lot in design, and is probably why the footage of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge callapse is still shown today to architecture, as well as engineering and physics students as a cautionary tale as well as being selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

I realize the architect was going for a particular aesthetic approach, however, it was not an architectural failure, but rather an engineering one because of the lack of knowledge in vibrations and resonance due to wind and natural frequencies of the bridge.

The bridge itself could have given the same aesthetics had the engineers altered the natural frequencies (which could have been done numerous ways). This is, literally, a text book example of structural engineering failures and has aided in greatly understanding wind phenomenons and how it effects the structure.

There are definitely some architectural failures in that article... this is not one of them.

Thanks for saying the exact same thing CDCox said about 159 seconds before you did.

I agree with you 100%. Especially since the actual bridge itself was designed by a bridge engineer, the same engineer who worked on the Golden Gate and not just by some architecture firm.

This one is more of an architectural failure, but there must have been hundreds of engineers on the job who had taken physics (as freshmen!) and knew all about how curved mirrors tend to focus light. If one of them had sent their concern up the chain of command, this could have easily been averted. Engineers have responsibility to society to make sure that the projects they work on are safe and serve the needs of their client regardless of whether a particular decision fell within their own realm of responsibility.

I believe engineers bitched and complained and were really against the Ray and Maria Stata Center building from the begining, but the architects wanted it their way, and like anything else in life will pay for someone to say yes. I am sure it is that way with these on the list, even though especially the Lotus Riverside, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge and a few others sure appears to lay at the feet of the engineering.

Yes, but failure is an unfortunate but necessary part of engineering. As a society, we want to do things that have never been done before. Build a thinner bridge, fly to the moon, build world-wide communication network, make an arena without interior columns. The engineer's job is make those dreams come true. He or she applies what is known from science and past engineering projects to the new challenge. However, as you push the envelope, new failure modes that were never even thought of before become important. Wind causes a light bridge to vibrate at it's harmonic frequency. The light sexy skyscrapers you build are susceptible to impact by jet liners. Engineers then analyze these failures, learn from their mistakes, improve their designs, which enables the next frontier in innovation.

It has been probably 15, maybe 18 years, maybe more, but I was in Boston when the windows were falling out of one of those beautiful new buildings. It seemed odd to see plywood in the window openings that high up on a new building.

I guess it depends on the time of year the glass was installed in the hotel. It might not have been an issue (and no one would have noticed) until weeks later when the sun was at the correct angle. It's probably an issue a couple of times a year, but it might affect other areas when it's not focused on the pool.

I wonder if they've come up with a solution? A film on the windows or something?

Yeah, I remember hearing how after the Hyatt Regency collapse it changed the way things were built around the country from both an architecture and engineering standpoint. Greater good can come from tragedy.

Othmar Ammann, a leading bridge designer and member of the Federal Works Agency Commission investigating the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, wrote:


"The Tacoma Narrows bridge failure has given us invaluable information...It has shown that every new structure that projects into new fields of magnitude involves new problems for the solution of which neither theory nor practical experience furnish an adequate guide. It is then that we must rely largely on judgement and if, as a result, errors, or failures occur, we must accept them as a price for human progress."

The Bronx Whitestone Bridge, which is of similar design to the 1940 Tacoma Narrows Bridge, was reinforced shortly after the collapse. Fourteen-foot-high steel trusses were installed on both sides of the deck in 1943 to weigh down and stiffen the bridge in an effort to reduce oscillation. In 2003, the stiffening trusses were removed and aerodynamic fiberglass fairings were installed along both sides of the road deck.

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