5 Shocking Architectural Failures

[ForeverChiefs58]

Was surprised Kemper made it and the Hyatt Regency callapse didn't make the list

5 Shocking Architectural Failures




People make mistakes, and sometimes those mistakes happen on the job. Usually, the incident is corrected and the whole thing is forgotten within minutes. However, the workplace mistake is harder to ignore when the person who makes it is an architect.

After all, when the teenager working the drive-thru window gives you a Quarter Pounder instead of a Big Mac, it causes a lot less trauma than when a 3,000-foot-long suspension bridge collapses into the Puget Sound.

In "The Yale Book of Quotations," the legendary American architect Frank Lloyd Wright is quoted as saying, “The physician can bury his mistakes, but the architect can only advise his client to plant vines.” While this statement from 1954 is still true today, it doesn’t take into account the architectural, design, and engineering errors that became possible in the decades after his death. Those mistakes have been bigger, costlier, and more spectacular than Wright could have imagined, and there are not enough vines in the world to hide them.

What are some of the more notable architectural failures in modern history? Here are five that impressed us:

Tacoma Narrows Bridge, Tacoma, WA


Amazingly, the whole collapse was captured on video.

The Tacoma Narrows Bridge was a suspension bridge that connected the port city of Tacoma, WA, with the Kitsap Peninsula. It was the third-longest suspension bridge in the world when it opened to the public on July 1, 1940, but it closed four months later after a spectacular collapse.

The cause of the collapse was inadequate girders that were used to keep construction costs low. They failed to keep the bridge deck in place, allowing it to sway violently whenever a strong enough wind blew.

This situation was already noticeable to construction workers, who nicknamed it “Galloping Gertie.” The name stuck when the general public crossed the bridge and noticed its similarity to a bucking bronco. It finally collapsed on Nov. 7, 1940, under the stress of a 40 mile-per-hour wind.

Lotus Riverside, Shanghai, China


Tenants had yet to move in, but one worker died in the incident.

The Lotus Riverside is a residential apartment complex in Shanghai consisting of eleven 13-story buildings. On the morning of June 27, 2009, one of them toppled over, just barely missing an adjacent building. Had it not missed, it might have caused one toppled building to topple into the next, creating a horrifying domino effect that, thankfully, did not come to pass.

The cause of the collapse was attributed to excavation that was in progress to create an underground garage. The earth removed from beneath the building was dumped into a landfill near a creek, and its weight caused the river bank to collapse. Water from the creek then seeped into the ground, turning the building’s foundation into mud.

Vdara Hotel & Spa, Las Vegas, NV


Fortunately, singed hair was the only human casualty of the unintended death ray.

When researching hotels for an upcoming trip, many potential guests hope to find certain amenities, such as a mini-bar, a gym, or close proximity to sightseeing. However, the Vdara Hotel & Spa in Las Vegas offers a unique accoutrement that neither its guests nor its architect anticipated—a death ray.

The hotel opened in December 2009 and featured a unique, curved structure. However, its design collected solar rays and beamed them to the hotel swimming pool area. Guests sunning themselves nearby were regularly singed, such as Bill Pintas, who claimed that the hotel’s impromptu death ray had burned his hair and melted the plastic bag he had with him.

Playground at Pier One, Brooklyn Bridge Park, NY


The offending domes have since been removed from the play area.

Most parents who take their children to the playground know the drill. Before putting their kids into a swing, they touch it first to make sure the seat, which has been sitting in the sun all day, isn’t too hot. However, the designers of the playground at Pier One in New York’s Brooklyn Bridge Park managed to overlook this principle when they designed three play structures for children to climb on, and built them out of steel.

The domed structures regularly became too hot to touch, much less climb. Geoffrey Croft, president of New York City Park Advocates, measured their temperature at more than 127 degrees, and parent Roula Fokas observed, “You can fry an egg on them." In July 2010, The New York Post reported the domes would be replaced with new equipment which, presumably, could be touched by anyone, at any time of year.


Kemper Arena, Kansas City, MO


About an acre of the roof collapsed from excess water.

Kemper Arena is an indoor stadium in Kansas City, MO, that opened in 1974. It had been the site of the 1976 Republican National Convention and it won raves for its unique design. Rather than employ view-obstructing columns, the roof was suspended from trusses on its exterior.

On June 4, 1979, the roof collapsed when a heavy storm battered the city. Fortunately, it wasn’t being used at the time, so there were no injuries or fatalities, but it was a shock to the city nonetheless.

The roof had been designed to release rainwater slowly, in order to avoid flooding the nearby West Bottoms area. This caused rainwater to collect on top and pool anywhere the roof sagged, creating excess weight. Worse yet, the roof was suspended from hangers, and the strength of their bolts had been miscalculated. Once a single bolt gave way, many of the neighboring ones followed suit, ultimately leading to the roof’s collapse.

http://realestate.yahoo.com/promo/5-...-failures.html

[aturnis]

Kemper made it but the Metro dome is alright?

[stlchiefs]

Originally Posted by aturnis

Kemper made it but the Metro dome is alright?

Kemper only collapsed once, the Metrodome has collapsed multiple times so it's not longer shocking.

Wasn't the Hyatt more of a job site implimentation error than an architectural error?

[Brock]

Originally Posted by Phobia

Wasn't the Hyatt more of a job site implimentation error than an architectural error?

Nope. The architecture firm okayed what they did.

[epitome1170]

Originally Posted by Brock

Nope. The architecture firm okayed what they did.

To clarify... it was a combination of structural engineering failure, relying on computer modeling too much and a deviation from the original design by the contractor.

Of all places... wikipedia has it accurate

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyatt_R...lkway_collapse

Three days after the disaster, Wayne Lischka, a structural engineer hired by The Kansas City Star newspaper, discovered a significant change of the original design of the walkways. Reportage of the event later earned the Star and its associated publication the Kansas City Times a Pulitzer Prize for local news reporting during 1982.[12] (Radio station KJLA-AM won a National Associated Press award for its reporting during the night of the disaster.)

The two walkways were suspended from a set of 1.25 inch diameter[13] steel tie rods, with the second floor walkway hanging directly under the fourth floor walkway. The fourth floor walkway platform was supported on 3 cross-beams suspended by steel rods retained by nuts. The cross-beams were box girders made from C-channel strips welded together lengthwise, with a hollow space between them. The original design by Jack D. Gillum and Associates specified three pairs of rods running from the second floor to the ceiling. Investigators determined eventually that this design supported only 60 percent of the minimum load required by Kansas City building codes.[14]

Havens Steel Company, the contractor responsible for manufacturing the rods, objected to the original plan of Jack D. Gillum and Associates, since it required the whole of the rod below the fourth floor to be screw threaded in order to screw on the nuts to hold the fourth floor walkway in place. These threads would probably have been damaged and rendered unusable as the structure for the fourth floor was hoisted into position with the rods in place. Havens therefore proposed an alternate plan in which two separate sets of tie rods would be used: one connecting the fourth floor walkway to the ceiling, and the other connecting the second floor walkway to the fourth floor walkway.[3]

This design change would prove fatal. In the original design, the beams of the fourth floor walkway had to support only the weight of the fourth floor walkway itself, with the weight of the second floor walkway supported completely by the rods. In the revised design, however, the fourth floor beams were required to support both the fourth floor walkway and the second floor walkway hanging from it. With the load on the fourth-floor beams doubled, Havens' proposed design could bear only 30 percent of the mandated minimum load (as opposed to 60 percent for the original design).

The serious flaws of the revised design were compounded by the fact that both designs placed the bolts directly through a welded joint connecting two C-channels, the weakest structural point in the box beams. Photographs of the wreckage show excessive deformations of the cross-section.[15] During the failure the box beams split along the weld and the nut supporting them slipped through the resulting gap between the two C-channels which had been welded together.

Investigators concluded that the basic problem was a lack of proper communication between Jack D. Gillum and Associates and Havens Steel. In particular, the drawings prepared by Jack D. Gillum and Associates were only preliminary sketches but were interpreted by Havens as finalized drawings. Jack D. Gillum and Associates failed to review the initial design thoroughly, and accepted Havens' proposed plan without performing basic calculations that would have revealed its serious intrinsic flaws — in particular, the doubling of the load on the fourth-floor beams.[

[Bugeater]

The Metrodome doesn't really collapse, it just deflates.

[4th and Long]

My belly is becoming an architectural failure, as of late.

[stlchiefs]

Originally Posted by 4th and Long

My belly is becoming an architectural failure, as of late.

That's not true, the blob shape of the "Bean" in Chicago is considered a great success.

[4th and Long]

Originally Posted by stlchiefs

That's not true, the blob shape of the "Bean" in Chicago is considered a great success.

Awesome! My belly has gone from failure to success!

[Setsuna]

Wow this is great. Architecture is my major. I never thought to look at failures to learn from. That's learning 101 I know. I'm special at times. Thanks for this. If anyone can post some more I'd be obliged.

[Otter]

Originally Posted by Setsuna

Wow this is great. Architecture is my major. I never thought to look at failures to learn from. That's learning 101 I know. I'm special at times. Thanks for this. If anyone can post some more I'd be obliged.

Is anyone here a marine biologist?

[cdcox]

Someone needs to learn the difference between an engineer and an architect.

An architect draws a pretty picture of a bridge or a building. It's up to the engineer to make it work or to tell the architect to get real. These are all engineering failures. But cutting edge designs and the resulting failures is one of the ways that engineering knowledge advances.

[Discuss Thrower]

Originally Posted by cdcox

Someone needs to learn the difference between an engineer and an architect.

An architect draws a pretty picture of a bridge or a building. It's up to the engineer to make it work or to tell the architect to get real. These are all engineering failures. But cutting edge designs and the resulting failures is one of the ways that engineering knowledge advances.

And thus is born the hate between the two parties.

[cdcox]

Originally Posted by J-Town Fan 1988

And thus is born the hate between the two parties.

Both professions serve their purpose. If engineers designed buidings, they would all look like boxes, with every square foot designed to deliver function. You don't want engineers designing anything more inspiring than a Walmart.

In contrast, when it comes to making sure the building won't fall down, you don't want someone grinding through the calculations or managing the project who would rather be sketching the next conceptual design.