What was the problem with the Citicorp building?
What was the problem with the Citicorp building?
The problem was discovered in 1978, when structural engineer William LeMussurier’s staff had a discussion with a Princeton University civil engineering student named Diane Hartley. Hartley claimed, correctly, that the building was unsafe, due to an unusual weakness to winds hitting the corners of the building.
What is notable about the Citicorp building in Manhattan in 1978?
The Citicorp Center engineering crisis was the discovery, in 1978, of a significant structural flaw in Citicorp Center, then a recently completed skyscraper in New York City, and the subsequent effort to quietly make repairs over the next few months.
What was the structural issue with the Citicorp tower that was discovered?
In 1978, the skyscraper’s chief structural engineer, William LeMessurier, discovered a potentially fatal flaw in the building’s design: the skyscraper’s bolted joints were too weak to withstand 70-mile-per-hour wind gusts. With hurricane season fast approaching, LeMessurier took no chances.
Who designed the Citicorp building?
Emery Roth and Sons
Hugh Stubbins and Associates
601 Lexington Avenue/Architecture firms
Where is Diane Hartley now?
Hartley has remained in the real estate world and most recently has estab- lished a boutique real estate consulting practice that couples strategic planning and business development. Her two sons are fully grown now.
What are the main issues that LeMessurier faced?
LeMessurier faced a complex and difficult problem of professional responsibility in which he had to alert a broad group of people to the structural deficiency and enlist their cooperation in repairing the deficiency before a hurricane brought the building down.
Is the Citicorp building still standing?
“An Historic Skyscraper?” I used to think this was one of the most inventive skyscraper designs in NYC, but times have moved on and so has design. And so has the skyline, so much so that this building no longer stands out.
What factor did the structural engineer William LeMessurier fail to account for in his building design?
LeMessurier had accounted for the perpendicular winds, but not the quartering winds. He checked the math and found that the student was right. He compared what velocity winds the building could withstand with weather data and found that a storm strong enough to topple Citicorp Center hits New York City every 55 years.
Did the Citicorp building collapse?
The design was announced in July 1973 and the structure was completed in October 1977. During the Citicorp Center engineering crisis less than a year after the building’s completion, emergency repairs were made after the tower was discovered to be vulnerable to collapse due to wind.
What did LeMessurier do?
LeMessurier worked through the revised wind tunnel data, and quickly discovered that the entire building was vulnerable to a total structural failure — if a storm pulled a joint apart on the 30th floor, the whole building would collapse.
What are some problems that architects and engineers must resolve when building to extreme heights?
10 Construction Challenges in High-Rise Buildings.
What happened to Citibank building?
In 2012, Brooklyn real estate investors Joel Schreiber and David Werner purchased One Court Square for $481 million from Stephen L. Green’s SL Green and JPMorgan Asset Management. In 2020, the Citi logo was removed from the building and replaced with a logo of telecommunications company Altice USA, a tenant.
