A light breeze at ground level may feel like a hurricane floors above, whipping the building enough to make people feel ill. Many modern tall buildings incorporate a tuned mass dampener, a counterweight that helps balance the force of movement on the building's exterior.
For example, the Taipei tower in Taiwan houses a spherical pendulum that sways back and forth, balancing the force of the wind from storms and typhoons. The size and weight of the damper are customized based on the mass and height of the building. They may swing like the orb in the Taipei or slide like a car's shock absorber to dampen the movement of the structure. It's built on a three-legged base to imbue stability, along with other features, so a damper system is not required.
The other approach is not to fight the wind but confuse or redirect it. Buildings incorporate aerodynamic features to ensure the wind can build up dangerous levels of pressure.
The main enemy is vortex shedding when wind passes the sharp edges of buildings. This condition creates eddies of air that batter the structure in unpredictable ways. Air currents can tune into the building's resonant frequency leading to vibrations or cyclic swaying that can worsen until the structure collapses. Architects are learning to direct the wind through and around the building use channels, fins and soft curves.
Slavish devotion to symmetry could lead to catastrophic consequences. The proposed story, 1,foot Dynamic Tower in Dubai takes confusing the wind one step further. Designers plan to have each floor rotate at the occupant's command or in unison with other floors.
The tower's changing shape could reduce wind pressure as well as provide stunning views of the desert landscape. Raising a supertall building will require rethinking materials. High-tech concrete reinforced with microfibers in a complex recipe of super materials could rival the compressive strength of structural steel. Because it's more massive, a concrete tower can have the same resistance to the wind in a thinner profile. Engineers are looking at aerospace materials like carbon fiber.
It's very light, very strong, and also very expensive. Is it hubris that drives humanity to build to the skies? Hubris always ends in a hard-won lesson, and in a mile-high building that comeuppance could be massive.
Making another disaster movie connection, the film "Skyscraper" made some admittedly over-the-top speculations about what could go wrong in a supertall building.
In the film, a fictional mega tall tower in Hong Kong is attacked and is engulfed in explosions and flames, and a character played by Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson must perform heroic rescues thousands of feet above the ground.
While it is a work of fiction, the film highlights that ensuring the safety of people a mile above the ground would also require new approaches to fire monitoring and mitigation and evacuation procedures. Toggle menubar Constructible: Construction Industry Resources. Open search box.
Search sitewide Close search box. The city below recedes into abstraction, a gridded 3-D map like an obsessively detailed blowup of the Panorama in the Queens Museum. The effect is not grandeur but its opposite: The inhabited world has been miniaturized for your viewing pleasure.
If you can already see from the Poconos to Great Neck, how would a glimpse of Syosset intensify the majesty? Seen from New York, the notion of a mile-high tower can seem like a distant, screwball real-estate venture, like an indoor ski slope in the desert or a fake Manhattan in China. Even a single Manhattan block could accommodate a 2,foot tower. A superblock — say, the one where Madison Square Garden now sits — could support something much bigger than that.
Although the next generation of superskyscrapers is likely to be built in other parts of the planet, they will still affect New York just by existing. Two or three contestants for the mile-high mark will sow an underbrush of half-milers. The real question is how those taller structures will shape the city below. That applies to One Vanderbilt, an office building that thousands of people will enter or cross through every day. Its base is stitched to transit, and its design needs government support.
It is, in that sense, partly a public building. But a new economic lunacy is reshaping the skyline: the fact that a very few will pay vast sums for a tiny number of apartments that they rarely occupy.
Their developers are selling a bizarre mixture of privacy and ostentation, and they require no approvals, which means they have no reason to care what the public thinks. That raises major moral questions. Supertall, superskinny towers benefit hardly anyone, but their impact is citywide. We could protect certain view corridors, as London does, or limit the shadows a tower casts, or impose an automatic public review on any building over 1, feet. Given the density we live in, and given that the sky provides daylight to all of us, does someone else have the right to take it?
It would be the biggest boost of federal aid to Amtrak since Congress created it half a century ago. Flynn said in an interview Monday. Already a subscriber? Log in or link your magazine subscription. Account Profile. Sign Out. Tags: architecture superskyscrapers new york magazine skyscrapers urbanism mile high skyscrapers More. Most Viewed Stories. In a bad echo of the last Republican primary, the former New Jersey governor seems to be picking a fight with Trump that he will lose.
Lawmakers are filing a formal resolution to censure Gosar for posting a clip in which his face is imposed on a character who kills Ocasio-Cortez. Most Popular. Some passengers with wheelchairs are charged extra on every ride, according to a Justice Department lawsuit.
While this massive tower was never built, today bigger and bigger buildings are going up around the world. How did these impossible ideas turn into architectural opportunities? Explore the physics of skyscrapers and other megastructures, including the modern materials and engineering practices that have enabled architects to design record-breaking buildings in cities around the world.
Related reading: A list of the tallest buildings. Bonus: A microgravity demo in the Willis Tower Skydeck elevator. This Webby award-winning video collection exists to help teachers, librarians, and families spark kid wonder and curiosity.
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