
A Design Flaw That Almost Wiped Out an NYC Skyscraper (2014) - Tomte
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_eye/2014/04/17/the_citicorp_tower_design_flaw_that_could_have_wiped_out_the_skyscraper.html
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yeukhon
Not too tagntial to the story, but what if, they had to tear it down? In fact,
some of skyscraper buildings may require reconstruction / rebuild for whatever
reason one century from now. Assuming the world is at least as dense today's,
how are they going to tear it down? Vagas's method works fine because those
casino buildings are pretty low profile compare to skyscraper, plus between
building and building there is always some open space gap, unlike in the busy
NY. We know from 9/11 the force is too great to contain.

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greenyoda
Note: From 2014.

Interesting discussion from original post:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7605993](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7605993)

~~~
kazinator
And not nearly as interesting as the engaging 1995 account from the New
Yorker:

[http://people.duke.edu/~hpgavin/cee421/citicorp1.htm](http://people.duke.edu/~hpgavin/cee421/citicorp1.htm)

Past HN subs on this topic, in reverse chrono, ranging from two months ago to
six years ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10360509](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10360509)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9656026](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9656026)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7605993](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7605993)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4817915](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4817915)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2618833](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2618833)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1325393](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1325393)

~~~
dang
We could change the URL, but the newer article does have additional detail
about the student who initially reported the flaw.

~~~
kazinator
Yes it does!

> _The BBC aired a special on the Citicorp Center crisis, and one of its
> viewers was Diane Hartley. It turns out that she was the student in
> LeMessurier’s story. She never spoke with LeMessurier; rather, she spoke
> with one of his junior staffers._

> _Hartley didn’t know that her inquiry about how the building deals with
> quartering winds led to any action on LeMessurier’s part. It was only after
> seeing the documentary that she began to learn about the impact that her
> undergraduate thesis had on the fate of Manhattan._

Neat.

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brudgers
The other famous American skyscraper with a design flaw was John Hancock Tower
in Boston:

[http://www.nytimes.com/1988/04/24/arts/architecture-view-
a-n...](http://www.nytimes.com/1988/04/24/arts/architecture-view-a-novel-
design-and-its-rescue-from-near-disaster.html?pagewanted=all)

Situated directly adjacent to H. H. Richardson's Trinity Chruch, it was a
failure of urban design as well.

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jlarocco
This article is pretty terrible. It's a pretty well known incident at this
point, and there have been several articles about it and IIRC it was even
covered in a PBS or History Channel TV show about skyscrapers.

The Wikipedia article about the building gives better and more accurate
information than the Slate article.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citigroup_Center](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citigroup_Center)

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Twirrim
This incident inspired an episode of Numb3rs, "Structural Corruption".

