![]() ![]() They at least warned people of the impending disaster? Double nope. So then what? They ordered the area evacuated at the onset of every storm? Nope. "We've been meaning to replace those brown buildings anyway - just aim for those." Should the tuned mass damper inside it fail, that rate drops to every 16 years. So how much difference could it make? Well, with the bolts in place instead of welds, experts predicted that on average, New York City was hit by a storm that could topple the building every 55 years. Which, no matter how much chewing gum you plaster over them to "really stick 'em in there," is simply not the same thing. LeMessurier himself looked into it and discovered that instead of the wind joints being welded on, as he had ordered in the design, the plans were switched to bolts during the construction. After a few stiff drinks, he managed to mentally get past that terrifying fact and spotted something else of concern: Quartering winds (winds that strike the corners of the building, rather than the flat faces) would cause far more loading force than they'd initially thought. One day engineer Joel Weinstein was looking at the blueprints and noticed something odd: It was a damn skyscraper on stilts. We just have vampires working on the lower floors." In the end, it's better to leave it all out there in the open, embarrassment and all. After a while, some wandering bladesman will doubtlessly show up at school to challenge your rep, and the other kids will find out the truth. They initially painted the plywood black in an effort to hide it, but that turned out to be like slapping a Band-Aid over a zit and telling everybody you got the injury in a knife fight. By April of that year, more than an acre of the building's exterior was covered in plywood like the backwoods 'shine-shack of some hillbilly giant. During one windstorm in January of 1973, over 60 windows were knocked loose from the building's facade. ![]() The problem got so bad that whenever winds exceeded 45 miles an hour, police would close off the entire area around the building for public safety. And it wasn't just a few of them, but hundreds and hundreds of windows hurtling to the streets below. And these aren't your cutesy little house windows, but 5-by-12-foot, 500-pound slabs of aerial death. The building liked to drop windows onto the pavement below. But luckily for us, it was more on the terror level of a kid with a magnifying glass than Chairface Chippendale.Īnd by "us" we mean "the people who have never been near it." Unluckily for humanity, Frank Gehry gave a building an uncontrollable death ray. Or, hey - just see how hot you can get that sidewalk (the answer is a ridiculous 140 degrees). Or nearly blind some drivers at nearby traffic lights. If you're the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, you set your sights a little lower: maybe just heat up some neighboring condos, like the Promenade Towers, by 15 degrees or so. If you're a comic book supervillain, you might use that knowledge to burn your name into the moon. If you concentrate that light onto a single area and angle it just right, you get a crude laser. "OK, so maybe we'll have to knock off the deposit."Īs you can tell from the above photo, the building in question is very shiny, and while shiny things are all sorts of pretty (by virtue of their shininess), they also tend to reflect light. Its foundations gave way, narrowly missing the neighboring structures, and just barely avoiding kicking off the world's most terrifying domino display. So when it rained soon afterward, the building was basically toast. ![]() To the surprise of, like, maybe one guy who never got to play in mud puddles as a kid, the creek's banks collapsed and flooded the area. Then they all turned on their jackhammers when a bevy of other engineers came by and repeatedly ignored their warnings about how bad of an idea it is to dam up a river right next to a new construction project. When workers began construction on an underground parking garage next to the structure, they piled all the dirt from that into a landfill beside a nearby creek. The building itself was OK - in fact, considering how well it held together after it "collapsed," we'll go out on a limb and say that it was pretty great - but problems were all around and, more specifically, beneath it. It was all due to an underground parking garage, some rain and a terminal case of made in China. ![]()
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