arch5422

Advanced Structures and Construction

3.1 Vertical Structural Systems

Historical evolution of tall buildings

Bologna in the 13th century. A city of towers.

The Two Towers

Bologna, Italy

12th century

The towers of Bologna were the worlds tallest structures in the 12th century. The Asinelli Tower is approximately 100m tall and is 9m wide
at the base. An aspect ratio of 11:1 ! To achieve such height in a masonry structure the walls at the base are almost 3m thick.

Washington Monument

Washington DC

1848-1884

The Washington Monument was designed by architect Robert Mills. On its completion in 1884, it became the worlds tallest structure (169m)
surpassing the towers of Cologne Cathedral, Germany (157m) completed only in 1880. The tower is slightly tapered and is 16.8m wide at the
base and 10.5m wide at top of the shaft(aspect ratio 10).

The Washington Monument design by architect Robert Mills, a classicist, presented a circular colonnaded base. Entrance is a consideration.

Construction on the monument was halted in 1854 due to lack of funds. The estimated cost of the tower was $1 million ($561,000,000 in 2012).

Statue of Liberty
93 m

Frederic Auguste Bartholdi, sculptor - Gustave Eiffel, engineer

Richard Morris Hunt, architect

Paris/NYC 1880-84

Eiffel Tower

Gustave Eiffel & Maurice Kochlin

Paris, 1889

324m

Calculation of wind loads on the Eiffel tower.

December 1887

May 1888

December 1888

The super structure of the Eiffel tower was constructed rapidly in about one year.

The foundations of the tower consist of thick concrete slabs with stone pedestal bases on top.

Lifts to provide vertical transportation were essential in a tower of 300m.

Evolution of the Modern Hi-rise Office Tower

Timeline of the tallest structures in the world with the tallest non-building structures (blue) and the new ecological skyscapers (green).

The Monadnock Building

Burnham & Root

Chicago, IL USA

1891

16 story solid masonry load-bearing walls. Note the shear walls in the transverse direction for additional resistance to wind loads.

The invention of the modern hi-rise building was made possible by three important
technological advances:
Glass curtain wall construction. The development of large, sheets of mass produced
glass allowed for the development of a transparency of envelope that provided large
amounts of daylight. In a hi-rise building the reliance on maximum light from the window
wall is essential as only the top floor can obtain natural light from the roof. Glass as a
building skin was introduced in Paxtons famous Crystal Palace for the international
exposition of 1851.
Steel frames. Enabled buildings to to be very tall and resist the extreme loads
resulting from gravity and wind. At the same time, the steel frame provided an open,
flexible interior space planning that was required for modern office accommodation.
Lift or elevator. Otiss invention of the lift provided the means for people to circulate
easier in tall buildings. In the NY Worlds Fair of 1853, Otis personally demonstrated
the safety of the lift. By 1857 the first passenger lift was installed in a building in New
York City.
The historical event of the fire of Chicago in 1871 that destroyed most of the central
built fabric of the city provided an impetus for rapid reconstruction of the city. The speed
of rapid assembly using a pre-fabricated framing system was ideal for building multistory office buildings on high priced real estate quickly.

Home Insurance Building

William Le Baron Jenney

Chicago, IL

1885

Often considered to be the first modern skyscraper because of its early use of a steel frame. Above the sixth floor the framing employed the first rolled steel
sections. All connections are bolted. The Home Insurance Bldg. also incorporated a passenger lift although not the first to do so (the Equitable Building in NYC
1870 by Gilman and Kendall was first). Above left: diagram of the Fair Store Building, Chicago, 1891 by Wm. LB. Jenney illustrating floor construction and
prefabricated terracotta fireproofing.
There must be sufficient material and no more, for it is essential, not only for economy but also to reduce the weights on the foundations that
the construction should be as light as possible, consistent with stability. William Le Baron Jenney

Three Chicago buildings: the first two on the left are by Holabird and Roche (1899). The faade of the Gage Building on the
far right is by Louis Sullivan. The glazing in the first two employs the Chicago style 3 part window frame. Sullivans faade
exhibits the naturalistic decorative elements (e.g. medallions at the top of the columns) that he later became known for.

Auditorium Building

Louis Sullivan & Charles Adler

1889

Bayard Building Louis Sullivan 1898 NYC

The expression of Romanesque style is attributed to the architect H. H. Richardson. In the Auditorium Building an expression of unity is
achieved through the rustication of the masonry and the scale and grouping of the window openings.. In the Bayard Building, Sullivan creates an
abstracted unity through the expression of the structural bay combined with a variation in ornamentation based on naturalistic themes .

Reliance Building

Daniel Burnham & John Wellborn Root

Chicago, IL

1894

The Reliance Building expresses the transparency of the modern glass curtain wall although the glass frames here are still infill units between
the spandrel beams. The reading of the columns is suppressed lending a strong horizontality to the fenestration. Window bay units are
cantilevered out from the structural frame.

Chicago Tribune Building

Raymond Hood & John Howells

Chicago, IL

1925

Bruno Taut

Walter Gropius and Hannes Meyer

Elliel Saarinen

On Elliel Saarinens design, the Italian critic Manfredo Tafuri wrote, His interpretation of the skyscraper is, in fact, exactly the
opposite of the whole American experience in the matter of the skyscraper: not a structure materializing the concept of laissez-faire,
and thus not an image of the competition among the great commercial concentrations but an element capable of exercising formal
control over the urban complex as a whole.

Glass Skyscraper project Mies van der Rohe 1922

Skyscraper Le Corbusier

Cap de la Marine

1938

City for Three Million Le Corbusier ca. 1924

Plan Voisin

Le Corbusier Paris 1925

Obus E Project for Algiers Le Corbusier

Cap de la Marine

1938

Bauhaus Design School: literal transparency

Reconfigured French window: phenomenal transparency

Use of regulating line and Golden Section proportion in the composition of the faade.

Obus E Project for Algiers Le Corbusier

Cap de la Marine

1938

Typical tall building circa 1920s. Lower east side Manhattan.

Paramount Bldg. New York, 1927

Possible skyscraper massing under the NYC 1920 zoning laws. Drawings made by Hugh Ferris with Harvey Wiley Corbett in 1922.

Barclay-Vesey Building
NYC

Voorhees, Gmelin & Walker

1926

Woolworth Building

Cass Gilbert

NYC

1913

The Woolworth Building at 235m was the tallest building in the world (the Eiffel Tower at 300m is not considered a building as it
lacks floor loads and enclosure). The 29-story base is U-shaped. The slender tower of the Woolworth Building grows gracefully
out of the base with a compositional flatness and layering that presages phenomenal transparency.

Empire State Building

Shreve lamb & Harmon

NYC 1931

At 383m the Empire State Building remained the tallest building in the world for 40 years. The time of realization from preliminary
drawings to completion was only 18 months. The structure of the tower is a braced steel frame with semi-rigid connections. It remains
one of the stiffest towers for its height, largely due to the heavy cladding that is designed to stiffen the frame.

Possible arrangements for lateral bracing

in a steel portal frame.

40 Wall St.

Severance and Matsui

NYC 1929

City Services Building

The double cab elevator.

Steel frame construction ca. 1930.

Leonidov

Moscow 1934

Russian constructivism

William Van Alen

Art deco style

Chrysler Building 1930

Rockefeller Center

Raymond Hood et al with Corbett, Harrison & Mac Murray

NYC

1933-40

The complex of buildings in the heart of Manhatten is possibly the most successful urban design complex of the 20th century. The main tower is 259m. Twenty-one buildings
cover 3 city blocks with features that include an underground commercial network, rooftop gardens and a sunken skating rink plaza in the center of the scheme.

Philadelphia Savings Fund Society Building, PSFS

George Howe and Willliam Lescaze

Philadelphia, PA

1932

A milestone in the history of American Modernism. Structure is a steel skeleton 150m tall with a transfer truss at the third level. This truss enables the banking floor on the 1st
level to have a wide column spacing of 19m. Above the columns are on an 8.5m grid. The bank building also introduced the concept of central a/c with the distribution located at
the mid-section of the tower so that the air supply and return ducts would be a short as possible.

Lake Shore Apartments

Mies van der Rohe

Chicago

1949

On the right is a view of one of the Lake Shore Drive Apartment towers. Note the narrow window bays on adjacent to the columns as a result of
the position of the column. This defect was corrected by Mies in a later project by recessing the column and letting the curtain wall pass in front.

Mies van der Rohe. Lake Shore Drive Apartments (1951), Seagram Building (1958), Dominion Center (1969) and IBM Building (1970).

The deflection of a tall frame structure is a combination of the

movement due to bending of the whole structure and the
horizontal deflection due to the bending of individual beams and
columns.

Portal Frame: Lateral load

Distribution of bending moments in a portal frame under lateral loading.

Note the mid-span and mid-floor height locations of inflection points. These
are points on the moment diagram where the curvature changes and hence
the moment force changes from sign (e.g. from positive to negative bending
moment). At this point the moment is zero.

Portal Frame: Gravity load

Lever House

Skidmore Owings & Merrill / Gordon Bunshaft

NYC

1952

Seagrams Building

Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson

New York City

1954-58

Seagram Building Mies van der Rohe NYC

1958

Lake Shore Drive Apts. Mies van der Rohe Chicago 1951

Types of vertical structural systems

end