William LeMessurier-The Fifty-Nine-Story Crisis: A Lesson in Professional Behavior

it's a great pleasure to be back home I even used to be a professor and insisted this institution for five years in the early 50s so I feel very comfortable here and I appreciate the nice audience including some of the more important people around here I'm going to tell you a story first about how a building got designed which i think is one of the more important buildings in the world if I may brag by some evidence of that is that I just got a communication from Paris two days ago that they want me to help them put out a complete description of this building to be shown in the Pompidou Museum in Paris in June of 1997 and they're going to exhibit famous structures of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries so this is I hope you will find it interesting building now we're going to start out with some slides and I'm going to lead you up through the creative process and then tell you about a few things that went wrong so we will start out with the first slide and this is the first 50-story building built in the world out of steel frame in New York City in about 1910 it is the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company building I show you that because the whole tradition of building tall buildings was quite advanced a long time ago the technology of making rigid connections between steel members was well developed and people were quite confident and twenty years later than they built on another tall building which is the Empire State Building that you can see in the background and for scale the one I showed you first is in the foreground there is what happened fifty stories nineteen ten hundred stories in about 1930 I'm something just fell on the floor anybody want to put that back on myself again anyway that's the Metropolitan Life that's the Empire State and that's what the Empire State Building looks like at night there are a few other famous buildings but we haven't desire to discuss them know this always technology of wind engineering and and so forth controlling the motion of the buildings was all fully developed about the time the Empire State went up people knew that you designed a building to control its motion some people are comfortable no that was a big gap during the 30s and the 40s and so forth people didn't start building again until the 1960s and the first real innovation in tall buildings I think it couldn't be saved this was one and it was famous because a great engineer designed it named Farah Khan and great architectural firms good morning Janeiro but the innovation in this building was the fact that it abandoned all the rigid frames and used diagonal bracing in the building and made an architectural feat you can see these great diagonal running up and down here John Hancock building in Chicago and it certainly has a Pepsi quality to it I think I think the engineers are the world really admired it anyway this building has never been copied because some people find it I think a little too own architectural I mean it isn't very loving but nevertheless I admire it well this building influenced me greatly I started designing tall buildings in Boston this was my first it's still there the State Street Bank downtown but it was the first thing you could call a skyscraper that I ever worked on then I did it in the same tradition as those earlier buildings it did have some unusual aspect it had all these long cantilevers at the edge of the building all the floors were cantilevered out 17 feet so that you didn't have columns at the edge obstructing the view another building that I have done here in Boston and this was in the early 70s you may have seen it downtown it's the Federal Reserve Bank this begins to get a little bit unusual there's a hole through the whole building which you can actually fly an airplane through there from one side or another I think somebody even did it once but but this is a building that has a huge span the whole building spans from one end to the other and these two towers at the end hold it up now the architect for this particular building was a man named Hugh Stubbins a very famous man in America and he had done some buildings for an MIT Harvard everywhere around here and done too many skyscrapers but this was really his first important one anyway he was picked to do a very unusual building in New York the city corp tower and we're now going to say his first rendering this is the arrived at after about a year of study the whole problem was to build a building on a site that has a church in one corner down in the back and the church owned the land and they had a crummy old building nobody wanted to save it it was the lowest point of Victorian architecture but they wanted to have a new building on the same site so they negotiated a deal with the bank that they would sell them air rights the whole volume of space in one corner of the building and the bank could had to develop a structure that would not penetrate that but it could hover above so this this led to the unusual configuration of the building you couldn't have columns in the corners where they ought to be and the conventional building so they were moved to the middle and this was my suggestion to say let's just have one column in each side and the building will then be symmetrical and now we have to find a way to build it the I started out thinking about building a table here and then putting a conventional building on the top but that seemed like the easy way out it was also the most expensive way out and there's another view of the building finished but let's get back to some brass tacks another view of the building finished on the side straight you can see there's quite a bit of scary excitement there when you walk around the corner and here's the church actually we did the church to the our same architect an engineer came the church is a rather nice building especially inside it's uh I don't know what those cars are doing there this is during constructions I wasn't finished that picture was taken but the church is it's floated on neoprene rubber believe it or not because the subway Lexington Avenue Line goes down the street and it would make it absolutely impossible to have a quiet service if you didn't isolate the sound and that works quite well we're not going to talk about the church further but now you look at that and it looks kind of bland actually the architect wanted to keep the building simple that it's spin because was so much drama going on at the bottom and at the top anyway he said no if you're gonna have any diagonals I don't ever want to see them so anyway in the middle of the building the elevators do come down to the ground and there's a very powerful stem there when I come to stem of a mushroom that keeps the building shear under control and has a lot of solid steel diagonals but this is the diagram for the structure of the outside this would be something I you laugh at me but I did conceive it on a napkin at a Greek restaurant in Cambridge and the thought process went like this that if we if we're going to have a big column at the bottom why don't we just run the big column all the way up and and pick up the loads of gravity coming down in increments and guide it down to the centre column by diagonal in compression and what you see here is a set of super modules you might say 8 storeys high loads come down there are picked up brought back there's another secondary load actually the bigger load right there anyway the loads are all gathered up and put and concentrated into one main column now this is a very efficient cantilever if you make a bracket with that proportion it's an ideal actually it's a mathematical ideal and so if you have to hang a building out what is actually 76 feet from the centre this is a good way to do it but the other thing about those diagonals is that when you wrap them around the corner and we have to remember all four sides are identical they all connect with those points and they form a triangulated tube or a structure that is three dimensional and is able to take the wind across the building now these are some pictures from construction you can just see some of this going on these diagonals coming up there I can't quite see it around the corner but it's there and so forth I think the second next picture is a little bit better but and there's some peculiar things going on here we are picking up these loads and bringing them down here on this corner and in order to make it behave the way I wanted it to behave I made sure that it couldn't go down any further if I just simply leaving the column out there that solved a nice architectural problem too because if you have three members ganging up in the corner it's kind of a nasty experience then you're inside trying to see out in this case we've got mitered glass around the corner but then while we're at it let me say something about the engineering of these diagonals the strains in those members are very important contributors to the overall deflection of the building and this building is over 900 feet high so the engineering to control its motion there's a central part of the design and you can't use high-strength steel and small members you need a lot of cross sectional area and a lot of material so the strains will be low this particular structure happens to get strained on when the wind is blowing straight out in the building even the diagonals in the plane perpendicular to the direction of the wind are strained so they're kind of a an extra demand so the C's man was actually quite over sized in the relationship to normal steel stresses when the building was drawn up and all that final drawings were set and and we had a joint venture partner in New York who made some of those drawings they were very very conservative and they called for these members being made with full penetration weld from time to time you can't build a diagonal going up eight stories and put it up in one piece you've got to put it in sections so there's a joint there and there and then there's another joint down there and so forth and there are five joints in every eight stories and every one of those members who may recall four to be welded and I knew that because I saw the drawings finished the top of this building ends up with a lot of construction up there which I'm not going to try to explain it was architectural reasons it does have a lot of cooling towers up there the form got generated who initially by planning apartments facing south and that was a none economic idea so but the forum survived this is the where the floor where the window washing machines come out and this is the last office floor but up in here is some remarkable things going on now one of the amazing things about this building structure that's the view up there during construction either nice is that it's so lightweight that when the wind blows it is more dynamically excitable than a building that weighed twice as much and we knew this was likely to be true now of course we've had the most sophisticated wind tunnel tests available in the world after the University of Western Ontario and a previous building that I had worked on they never got built that was - been in New York and led me to think about a similar problem and to solve the problem of the building's excessive motion by an enormous damping device so this time we were ready and we did tests of this machine called attuned mass damper in the models that were tested in the wind tunnel here's the kind of a that's a little out of focus to me but anyway this is a map of New York and shows you within that circle the area that would be modeled in detail in the wind tunnel that's at a scale of one to five hundred and since this is the eight feet eight foot diameter on the model in the wind tunnel it's four thousand feet diameter circle and every every building in there is modelled to scale because they all influence each other that's our building in the middle this can be rotated and you could figure out what the built wind does from any direction this is what the models used to look like they know to be more there they've simplified the process but this was a model that pivoted and was built to be the dynamic scale I mean everything was scaled properly so the building actually moved and with these sensing devices down here and and one thing another you could measure the actual mechanical response and get the forces on the building how did that would come data of this sort people always want to know how much a building moves at the top well there's a chart that would tell you if you don't do anything on your special to the building and you have a natural damping which is as low as you might get but in a steel building of 0.5% 0.05 percent 0.5% that's right anyway this is a time return period of storm if you took a 50 years storm the thing would move not quite 2 and a half feet if you go to a 150 year storm it's moved three feet if you put a device in to control the change the dynamic behavior you can lower these things way down and this is actually what we ended up doing is putting in something that achieved four percent of damping mechanically what's going on what makes these buildings move well when the wind blows hit on a building this way things are gonna happen that make the building goes perpendicular to the direction of the wind and oscillate if you ever rode a boat down a stream and saw a cat tail in the moving water you will see fine it's swaying back and forth across the stream this phenomenon is called vaults from vortex shedding which was figured out by a great German von Karman way back in about 1910 that if you have a fluid moving by an object that is symmetrical you will get turbulence develop alternating on each side and the time intervals of this term turbulence is forming which are called vortices what wussies they're like tornadoes up and down the building can be determined and it's a function of this dimension of the building the density of the fluid and the velocity now if these things get near synchronous with the natural frequency of a building you got a serious problem in fact that's the ultimate design criteria we want synchronous but imma show you this as a example of what it is that excites the building if the building is excited and has no significant self damping it takes a long time for the vibrations to die out if you put a tuned mass damper that has an enormous amount of damping and it dies out in a very rapid rate and you combine the two you control the damping time very effectively now what does the Troodon mass damper look like here is a plan of the very top of the building and in that plan what you see is a mass of concrete which is 29 feet square and about 8 feet thick and weighs 400 tons it is floated on pressurized oil bearings and in each direction it is connected to two things really I'm gonna see another picture of this but this rig in there is a spring believe it or not were made of Pistons opposed to the direction of motion but they move anyway it's the compression of gas it is controlled beautifully by geometric devices to get it up to the what we need we needed a spring that would go plus or minus three and a half feet and have a force of about 100 150 chips that's it enormous spring a very complex design problem to work in both directions you don't use a helical spring for that I'm tired of that anyway this thing can move back and forth this way the way and then there's a ring to keep it from twisting here here's a plan of all this and I don't think you can study all this now but you I'm giving you all a little handout later on and then the one of the pages in there you can study this machine a little more detail if you want this this slide I really apologize it's got much too much information in it but you get the sense let's look at the real thing there's a model of it again that was made by the manufacturer incidentally how did this get made I had some very good advice from a lot of people one of the great advisors was the man who gave me the idea in the first place which name professor Robert Scanlon who was a great man in the history of dynamics and vibration control particularly bridges he's just readied retired finally from Johns Hopkins where he has been for the last twelve years but he was at Princeton at the time I met him and he told me all the principles of tune mast amperes and he said I don't know anything about buildings or that go on your own after that but he guided us to the literature some of which was written at MIT porce theory of random vibration anyway the final development of this came out by us figuring out what we needed and what the scale of it was and then having a performance specification and seeking some proposals from manufacturers a great man who was a mechanical engineer I think he was even head of the department here one time named David warmly was the principal consultant who advised me to seek hydraulic bearings on this thing and high in hydraulic springs we had talked about all kinds of ball bearings and he said you don't put things like that on ball bearings you put a locomotive on ball bearings you gotta exercise it every day did you know that the bearings flattened anyway this floats on grease we went to a manufacturer and they came up with a wonderful company in Minneapolis named mts systems there's a mechanical genius there named Neil Peterson who developed these extraordinary devices which are the springs and if you look at this thing this point is going to move back and forth and we've got two opposed pistons here they're pre charged with nitrogen gas now we move this thing and they move neither one direction or another well the force and that moves it this way it's only a component of the force going on in this thing but it turns out that when you combine these these dimensionally superimpose the two actions of going this way this way and take into account the non-linearity of the compression of the gas you end up with a more or less linear spring I mean this is what we wanted I think it's a it's absolutely one of the most ingenious mechanical devices that I've ever seen that's what it looks like these are the cylinders opposed this thing rides back and up you know there's an thing called an actuator at each end which is essentially a dashpot except it's a very sophisticated one with sort of feedback mechanical valves that keep the pressure going well this what does this thing do there's a picture of it standing there this black hole there is nothing but black oil that it's floating on but we'll see another picture in a minute this rig keeps it from twisting if you look very carefully underneath you can see this these silvery discs there are 16 of them and they have oil pumped in and our pressure there that levitates the mass and makes it available to start moving freely when it needs to most of the time it just sits there there are devices on the building that measure acceleration is constant they and only when you get a background level acceleration three milli G's Milla G's does their sign there winds coming in that might come on this thing here is that safety device and they're all around the edges of it in case something breaks and the thing has moving at full velocity and has an enormous momentum yeah it would cause a lot of trouble yeah these two pictures show you the amplitude of motion this is these were taken doing an initial installation of it all back in about 1977 and the thing is being exercised and forced to move so here it's lean way over as far as it goes and this thing has to lean to follow it and then this picture it has gone all the way the other way and this thing is lean back and this has been deliberately crashed to test these snubbers the snubbers are the same kind of thing they used the dead railroad tracks and railroad stations because if the locomotive brakes lose you don't want to crashing through the station and so these have a long history and are highly reliable if you didn't have those and this curb anchored to the building and something got loose where the whole machine would be out in Central Park now this is the end of my slide the building got built it was dedicated in 1977 I think the topping out was 76 received a lot of publicity became a favorite building in New York people like to go there because their restaurants and recreation things of all kinds in the lower floors and and it's very convenient there's a subway line that enters right in the corner and so I think that's the end of the slides and I'd like to have the full lights now but so far we've got a building with an unusual degree of structural elegance I think and simplicity and the first tall building in the world ever built with mechanical help to make the structure work that's remarkable incidentally that has been now copied a hundred times in Japan and we did the same thing in the Hancock building we were hired to correct some motion problems there a few years ago but this is ubiquitous and when I go to Japan I'm treated like a tin god because I'm the father of the tune master really well in the spring of 1978 May I was with the architect in his office and we were planning some new buildings some new towers to be built in Pittsburgh and we had a meeting with the US Steel representative and we plan to use these diagonals all over again they saved so much money and architects actually liked it because there's so many much more open space when you're inside trying to look out the man from US Steel asked how did you make the connections in the field on these diagonals I said I know how we made them we welded them full penetration weld he said you did if that's terribly costly hard to get reliable welders I don't think we would want to do the job if they were full penetration wells and these are humongous steel column sections so I said well I don't know I know it got done I called my we had a branch office in New York at the time and I called my partner down there and I asked him how did they work out he said well didn't you know Bethlehem Steel who built the building cave and they offered two hundred and fifty thousand dollars back to the bank if they could read his heart a different way of connecting these things not just because fighting the welders was difficult but the whole process slowed down the erection of the building and they said we don't think you need all these full welds we understand these members are in compression and they need to be connected up for the difference between tension from the wind and the compression that's in there of course they would compression that's why we put them that way so this was a perfect perfectly reasonable request an office proceeded think this through Bethlehem Steel actually designed beautiful vaulted connections for the forces that my people gave them and that was that the building went up and smoothly and everybody's happy June 1978 I'm in my office I got a call from a student that some I do not know the school I wish he would call me for the pass he never has but anyways a real student from New Jersey I think he was an architectural student and his teacher had given him this building to study and report on because it's unusual and his teacher said to him that engineer didn't know what he's doing and nobody should put the columns in the middle they should put him in the corners and silly and I told the student I said well you're you're a professor it's full of it he doesn't understand the problem we had to solve because there was a church in the corner so this whole structure developed to accommodate a special problem and then I got into a little study talk on the phone I actually called the students back because I couldn't talk to him continuously when he first called and I called him back and pointed it out to him that there's some peculiar things about this building and you have a little picture don't look at it now but study it at home tonight and you'll see that when a conventional building has four columns and the four corners the actual the worst loading cassius when the wind is on the diagonal believe it or not and and in our building the worst loading case was not the diet but it was the store Denari wind that everybody thinks about the wind pushes straight on the building that was the critical case so I said you tell that to your teacher and then you will have something up on him now that night I afternoon later on I sat down and made a few drawings almost like the one you have in the end of your handout there that so we'll think about the effect of diagonal winds on every aspect of this structure the one that really concerned me most was did deflection make any difference I should have known better if you've got a absolutely symmetrical structure being symmetrical about both axes by the stiffness is going to be the same in all around all axes but I noted to prove that to myself and since this wasn't simple beam and had a lot of shear stresses I had to go through the calculations in the diagonal forces and I'm so old-fashioned I can do it without a computer you say and I doing my method of virtual work and when you do that you come up with some curiosities that when you put the wooden down the diagonal direction of the building I'm sorry about the confusion between diagonals but we're talking about the diagonal direction of the wind and now we look at the diagonals the stress is in half of the vanish and in the other half double now this is a very peculiar behavior and suddenly a little light went on up here I said well let's last May I heard that they had supplied forces to Bethlehem Steel for the connecting these tension force is the difference between contention and compression I don't it would be a miracle if they ever thought that through to think about the diagonal wind it just wasn't in the nature of anybody the mindset of people throughout the world designing of rectangular buildings to look at it out of the Droid and the wind goes this way so I had a bit of a worry I didn't panic right away but I decided to go down to New York to my office when I could get there and took her week or two night alerted them guys down there and I said I would like you to get out the drawings the detailed drawings of all these connections and they heard them all they're called shop grind and let's go through the process of how these were designed well there was no question they hadn't taken straight on win not the diagonal went but then it turned out they had done something else food there was an argument between two guys in the office about interpreting the building code and the building code which was kind of an antique in the orc at the time said something about columns in twelve buildings then get tension from wind when the building's leaning over you should only subtract from the tension of the wind three quarters of the dead load but one of these nit pickers in my office said well this isn't a column in the building it's like a diagonal in a truss and they didn't say anything about that so you can use the full dead load don't think about that if you've got two hundred ships of tension from the wind and you've got 1,600 Kip's of dead load you can subtract one from the other and you get four hundred and the bolts were good for about a hundred chips each so that would take four bolts if you took only three quarters of 1,600 which would be 1,200 away from 2,000 again 800 left you need eight bolts so just that little thought process which had nothing to do with the diagonal wind got to to few bolts in the first place and then you now find out that the wind force are going to be up like 40% more due to this diagonal behavior this thing is in real trouble now there was only one thing I could no need one more straw I could clutch hat and that was to fly up to Canada and hit the wind tunnel people do retrieve all the data they had which they had on magnetic tape and they had all the computer skills make it answered me the question of what is the maximum probable force in the hundred years or any time period and any one of these diagonals in the building and I went up there and they had the data and it was even worse some peculiarity which I don't understand to this day in the dynamic response things gang up from time to time it Peaks that a little more than the geometric simplicity of fluid and laminar flow so anyway the forces were of 60% I collected all the data from them trying to keep my cool I had all the data on every one of these joints went home then up to Maine went to my little island which we own and isolated myself for three days my wife was there calculated away what I wanted to know was when was when was this building going to fall down I found out two things because I had both dead data for both circumstances if the dampers were working they made an enormous benefit but did the dampers fail because the storm knocked the power out and you had to rely on that structure by itself the return the period to failure was 16 years think about that what does that mean return period I don't know 50-50 chance that such a storm will come in 16 years I guess statistics are not my forte but anyway essentially that storm was going to fall down in my lifetime and since this was July it could fall down the summer of 1978 because the Hurricanes are what going to be what does it Oh what do you do here I am the only man in the world the only person in the world who knew this my friends up in Canada was so professional they would keep their traps shut forever so Here I am there's nothing wrong with the building nobody knows anything's wrong there's no cracks there's no building behaves itself perfectly Oh what do you do well first of all I did sit down and say how would I fix it you can always you could fix anything if you think hard enough and one of the nice things about this story was that these diagonals because the architect didn't want to show them on the outside they were set back from the glass line so that you could even draw curtains between the glass and these things so they're freestanding sculptures if you will some people hate them in the building but anyway they were quite accessible and the connections were made above the floor so that the workers doing the bolting could get at these connections in most cases it easily so they were very accessible and was easy to see that you could plant big steel plates two inches thick six feet long like band-aids literally band-aids on both sides of these joints all you had to do was open them up and get the material well and you could build all the strength in the joint that you needed because there was never any question about the strength of the members themselves question is how do you mobilize people to get this done at what's going to happen to you well I went home back to my office told my wife I said we're gonna have to solve this problem if you read The New Yorker story it says I fought briefly about driving into an abutment but that's fine that's true but then I said I would miss the end of the story so I got back to the office instead of thinking what do you do first well I got to call my client was the architect turns out he was in California and was taking an extra day non-business day the secretary didn't know how to reach him oh god we got to move I called his lawyer and said you got to represent the architect cuz I can't act I might contracts with you and he's oh no no well fighting he agreed to meet me and he gave me the best information I could get now you have professional liability insurance as a as an architect or engineer these days unfortunately and so first thing you do yeah he said you called your insurer first don't you take any unilateral action you might cut yourself off from your coverage so we call the insurer we was on Chicago but they had lawyers in the arc the lawyers called me back said be here tomorrow morning at 9 o'clock don't you speak to anybody in this world they call me back later in the day and said we're gonna have another engineer here to listen to you he thought I was nutty no no nobody in his right mind calls up and says my buildings going to fall back when there's no visible evidence in distress so anyway I rejected the first engineer who shall remain nameless I mean it was perfectly competent man but he didn't know enough about tall buildings were particularly wind so I said why don't you get Leslie Robertson now listen Robertson is a very famous man in this world he was the one that designed the World Trade Center towers he knew a great deal about damping wind tunnels and I figured that I didn't want a horse around I wanted to get the best critic and my own thoughts is a matter of fact so I went to New York talked to the lawyers for an hour and then they brought les in let's listen to me that the whole problem is so simple if you think about that geometry and so forth it doesn't take more than ten minutes to realize that this is a disaster the wonderful thing that happened then was that the insurance company said we can't wait we got to do something no way you have to do something the measure am i empowered to do something yes call up the bank let them know tell them how we're gonna solve the problems see what they do first I had to go back to Cambridge and get mr. Stubbins who flew in that night from California and sit him down in his house and mix him a martini and and and get him calm and the lawyer was there with me we told them you know our buildings going to fall down and we don't fix it but don't worry we're going to fix it I said you have to come with me tomorrow morning I got a ticket for you on the plane we could get first-class tickets to New York in those old days and and we're gonna try to call Walter Wriston well I don't even know who Walter Wriston is but he was the most powerful financial person in the world and he was the chairman of the board of the Citicorp corporation which is you know multi billions and and I had met him once but the architect always has more contact with the high muckety-mucks than the poor engineer anyway he came down Stubbins come down to my office and we tried to call on the phone now you don't call Walter Wriston and expect to jump for a meeting into the next 20 minutes he might wait a month well what will we do next well it was a wonderful man who was a senior vice president at the time we were designing the building and he had spent some time here at MIT at the Sloan School and he had a good deal I don't know rub off knowledge about engineering and mathematics and one thing in another and so when the decision on whether he put that damper in the building had to be made by some high echelon person they called him in and his name is John Reid and today he is the chairman of Citicorp but he was chairman in Waiting even then I found out so he did agree to see Hugh Stubbins in me it's think of you half an hour I went talk to him told him the whole story I said I need your help I have to have this at once we have no choice in this matter and here's a solution this is how we can fix it but you have to mobilize the forces only you can do that for me and it's how much is gonna cost I don't think it's gonna cost an awful lot millionaire to that's nothing we're building the cost 175 minute and if it falls down so he kept his cool I think I did he's a great guy and he said all right you go back to your office and wait for further communications and then my office actually happened to my chance to be one block away so Hugh Stebbins and I went over and and I had other people with me and I Robertson came to I guess he wasn't at the meeting with Reid but where we had lunch finished dessert my secretary came over and said Walter Wriston is coming to our office in 10 minutes can you imagine that so he did and he turned out to be a wonderful fella and the story was repeated to him over again and and he said well I guess we have to act don't we what am I supposed to do I guess I'll have to handle the public relations and I'll have to handle the relations with the people in the building there were people in the building attendance in the building they got to communicate with them no we had to cook up a line of bull I'll tell you and white lies at this point are entirely moral you don't want to spread terror in the community to people that don't need to be terrorized we were terrorized no question about that but I had gotten a little piece of knowledge up in Canada that from a guy that when I was up there and this hurried mission and they said we have had more data developed on the wind velocities in New York's since the original tests word out of 1970 this is eight years later and we have found that the probable wind velocities are a little bit higher the hundred-year store but thank you very much so we passed out that as the light of bull that the measure had found there was no data and he is recommended to Citicorp they did a rather minor effort they can bring the building up to a survive a wind load of a thousand years that's what actually got printed in the press how many of you may have read this New Yorker story the greatest thing that happened no I'm getting ahead of myself wait no not far these press releases where it went out and the tabloids at night more or less what I've said I had to set up headquarters in New York and I had a nice car in my office whose cousin was the night manager at the Waldorf Astoria I said I need a suite with two bedrooms and baths because other various people are coming in going consultants and so forth and so he called me and said well you're gonna have Frank Sinatra's suite for a month that turned out to be quite comfortable my wife came down to answer the phone and now I got back she said well they'll the New York Times called 5:15 Oh I called the lawyer in Boston who I have to talk to them look at if you don't talk to them they'll smell a rat you've got to do something you've got to try and so I mixed a martini for myself and it's one minute past 6:00 I dialed the New York Times I pick it up the phone they pick up the phone it's a tape recorder saying the New York Times has gone on strike as of six o'clock not only did the New York Times go on strike but all the newspapers in New York went on strike until October so we had a press blackout and that was the greatest thing that ever happened television was never awake at that time they got their information first from the newspapers in those days so anyway nobody ever knew what was going on except the few people directly involved no we we got mobilized very quickly and within days we were welding and this process went on really quite an orderly way I stayed down there all the time it was the constants of calculation trying to figure out which joined two men today or tomorrow to be ahead of the game in the return period to failure the other thing I did and the very first day was to get the power lines brought in to run that damper around the clock and we got three experts from Minnesota from the people who had made it and they stayed there like nurses 24 hours a day there was somebody there to change the valve or do anything that needed to be done away I didn't expect it to break but good heavens you got a whole building riding on it you don't take any chances it's almost steps were taken less Robertson was initially I arranged with the insurance company to make him my consultant the bank said well now there's two guys we are anybody in our size so Russ and I worked it out that I would release him from being held to me and he became the representative of the bank so the two of us then but he really I must say he did not believe in my damper he said I formally can't believe in your damper I have to take the idea that this building will damper will not work and if the wind comes and the storm is coming up here from the Caribbean and we aren't fixed yet we have to evacuate the neighborhood this building's 900 feet high sometimes I've talked about this and the title of the talk is wide Citicorp did not fall on Bloomingdale's Bloomingdale's is four blocks north on Lexington Avenue you see the blocks were only 200 feet so the top of it would fall right on blooming though I stayed out of the loop except on the final panic button loop but there was a whole protocol set up by approaching the mayor's office talking to all the security people in New York police and specials people there was a whole contingency plan of who called who and how this would happen and the police would evacuate ten blocks around this building which means thousands of people the Red Cross was ready with 2500 volunteers to be called at any moment to Shepherd all these homeless out find places for them to go there was a big storm coming there was a three different weather in services hired constantly making reports every day will Rumble down there in the Caribbean the so forth there was one funny thing that happened this building was so symmetric all that Robertson got electric strain gauges on all the eight diagonals on one floor which wasn't yet occupied by a tenant so you had a perfect way to measure the forces the building in any instant there was no other place for the forces to go so this was typed into his office and there's tapes made all the time recording all these things and nothing much happened except they came into the office one morning and then gone off the chart what's happened we didn't hear of a storm last night did we he made a very great tactical error he bought some experts from California flown in to put these strain gauges on who never thought that they should hire a New York union electrician so the union found out electrical work was done by 9:00 Union people they went up and snip the wires so the building went off the chart anyway well I you know I had a lot of fun once it got going the exhilaration was quite something to see that little old country boy from Cambridge could start such pray forces moving everybody was absolutely wonderful we had a big meeting with the city of New York les Robinson said didn't he was very correct about this is the first thing you must do and anything like this you have to let public officials know you don't want them to hear about it secondhand they'll hold it against you ever forever you have to put them in the know before they somebody calls them up so we got in touch with the head of the New York Building Department and there was about six people from the department left their office and came over to Robertson's office and the contractor and I went down and I simply told them the whole story of course they didn't have any choice I mean what are they going to do they trying to be very nice wonderful they said gee if everybody behaved this way we wouldn't have to have a building department so that's true am i doing something wrong so the crunch finally came at the end of the summer you've read story perhaps but we had this hurricane watch all the time the wheat he was most calm summer that you could imagine but as Labor Day weekend was approached in which is the end of August you know first of September this storm was coming up the Atlantic and on Thursday the night it really became quite serious see the one storm that would knock this building galley-west we'd have to come right up the Narrows and the eye of the hurricane would go up the Hudson just a little bit to the to the west of the building so you get the full southeast winds head-on that's what you have to worry about it's a rare event but here was one that had within its track record I mean in the track records of things like that before it could happen so there was a real panic on Friday morning the beginning of the Labor Day weekend I canceled my trip to Maine and so forth we had to sit there and say they the people actually all talk to me they thinking about talking to Robertson because they came to believe me that maybe the damper would save the building so if the damper is running what storm can we stand I said we can stand a two hundred year storm no it still didn't make anybody feel good but by noon on Friday or thereabouts we did get a call from the weather services this storm is moving out to sea and it did and so I had a good night's sleep and the next morning everybody else is gone left New York and Holiday Labor Day weekend I had it all to myself rather boring but that's all I needed and so I got a taxi and to drive me up to the which is the marvelous medieval cloister that the Rockefellers built up on the shore of the Hudson of her part of New York I had never been there before but I'd heard about it and so I signed in The Cloisters and bask in the nice beautiful sunshine because you know and a hurricane goes through the sky gets clear the next day then you ever see it again and that's really the end of the story now wait a minute a couple more things here who paid my insurance and it was really fantastic they knew perfectly well sooner or later somebody's gonna come around claiming want some money there are two questions here did we do anything wrong legally and one defense for any kind of professional error is have you done it everything as well as your peers would have done and there are a lot of people very specialist in this area who gave that a lot of thought and said this is the most defensible case there is because nobody and his brother would ever look at the diagonal wins that's just not in the mindset and so well I don't care whether it's defensible I didn't want to go to court but I got my insurance company to give me what I call walking around money we had a joint venture you remember and the 50-50 liability and even if you didn't do anything wrong which my partner didn't he still has to pay if things go wrong so he had only a million dollars of insurance so we had something more because we were bigger company at the time but I said okay give me his million and get take a minute out of my pocket insurance pocket and give me two million and let me settle please use lawyers all stay away I did one meeting with the bank and they all grumbled and I let them know but you know we can we can fight this out in the court and we will win we think but I don't want to fight down the court and I'm offering you two million so one more meeting and the lawyer went with me to sign the papers and that was it so we really had no contention in the end that was a very serious matter at the end of that year the insurance company called up by office and my second-in-command who was a retired Army colonel and he handled all these difficult things and they said well we're gonna have to raise your premiums after that mess he flew out to Chicago where the headquarters were and he gave an impassioned speech to them it said not only should you not raise our premiums you should lower our premiums in return for our behavior yourselves so well and preventing one of the greatest insurance disasters of all time that might have happened do you know what they did well all well that ends well I had to keep my trap shut for 8 to 17 years I've talked about this some times of time to some of my students and I've talked about it once at the University of Texas to a group of Engineers or I've talked about it at a hidden sequestrated conference in California where a group of people got together and everything was off the record there were no tapes and no nothing like this going on and and I began to realize that people were deeply interested in this story I did not seek the New Yorker writer he saw at me he found out about it through a grapevine and finally approached me about three years ago now almost and I checked him all out very carefully but he I think he's a super guy and very experienced writer all his life and we spent several days together and I gave him all of the documentation that I had which is very well done by my colonel aid and so we have memos of every hour every day all that summer of who was doing what and where and I think I'm being authoritative so that story came out and as a result of that I'm here and I've enjoyed your company and be happy to answer questions do your homework but that you don't have to give me any papers in return thank you very much [Applause] don't be shy yes sir years ago my father told me the story of Samuel Insull installing the first steam turbine electric generating station in Chicago and when the time came to turn it on mr. insel said I want to be there and his subordinates said what if it blows up mr. Anson and mr. insel said if it blows up I blow up anyway so I'm going to be there well there are some I can't tell you where they are because that's a secret I have some very good friends in the engineering profession and some of them have sought my advice from time to time and there's a building in a major city I think it may be going to get fixed but it is a very important building by owned by a very important national corporation I'm not going to give you any clues where the city is it's not Boston or New York but anyway it was designed by perfectly competent engineers who because of the code didn't say they had to do it actually never even calculated the deflection of the building can you imagine that there was some storing experience of this building and there actually behaved pretty well but it scared everybody the only reason it behaved well it was a in the Lee of another building that the storm had coming for another direction it would have been there 50 stories totally under designed second-order effects in spades it wasn't the diagonal wind problem but there all kinds of problems we already had one here in Boston you know the Hancock building got fixed whole new structural frame in the law and erect that's another story but Brunel theremin professor of structures at Smith Technical Institute in Zurich was hired review this building forget the cards put all of science on it he was the make greatest man in the world and failure mechanisms of steel structures and he almost caved the blessed because he had an extra three months to kill between the time he made it his initial report and the board meeting he he D being a rigorous fellow looked at the building in the long direction and that's where the trouble was that he said this building will not survive the hundred years to the windstorm now this was not mark designed by irresponsible people it was designed within a paradigm for designing tall buildings the same one that had been used for the Empire State Building and every other building but when you build a building this wrong and that narrow at one end you've run out of the range of experience with that paradigm and so it got a new frame it was frame was doubled the stiffness of the building was doubled no there there are a lot of them out there of course the old buildings I mean the Empire State Building would never have stood for a minute if it didn't have stone walls all around you know that building was studied when it was built and people actually calculated way back in the 30s what this the period of vibration of the bear frame would have been and it was going to be a bad been about 17 seconds that is over the hero I'll tell you the you measure the building's period of vibration today even and it's three and a half seconds so where's all this stuff coming from that gives you that extra rigidity it's coming from the partitions in the concrete around the columns and the stone walls and stuff the frame isn't even working there yes sir my understanding the result of the Northridge earthquake but there are some problems in Los Angeles with welded structure well you're absolutely right in a way that Northridge earthquake was a gift from the Lord because we had so much data out of it well the most interesting buildings you know the the Getty foundation is a huge building was been under construction out there and there the Getty foundation has a billion billion dollars worth of artwork to put in the building so they had a lot of their connections crack in the steel frame they weren't even finished buildings but they also have a lot of money so they gave immediately within weeks they set up a whole research program at the University of Texas in Austin which has some of the best testing laboratories we don't have them at MIT anymore but for full size structures anyway and and they reproduced these failures with the same kind of connections with dynamic testing and then they figured out what to do to make them better so I think there are solutions that are known how do you get at older buildings to do all the fixing it's not simple but at least for the next round of earthquakes I think we know how to do them better and there was connections in the getty museum or taking advantage of this knowledge this means welding supplemental plates on top of the flanges of a steel being worried about the column so that the ductility happens not at the joint but out in the beam the beam itself is the weak part laughter well Facebook I think it's quite that way because that's tapered down in the way anyway they've proven with the same tests that reproduce the first factors that this doesn't doesn't fail now yes sir process you went through today is there a way to my life not this story particularly but I teach regularly architects at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and I think it's terribly important then to understand that then nobody's perfect and they'll never be perfect you have to face up to these things in small ways all the time and so I tell them this or I tell them how to behave too I had one student came to me a couple of years ago he said I've been through four years of college and four years in graduate school and nobody in academia ever told me how to behave before that's that's pretty shocking no I'm sure that's not true at MIT but no I reaffirmed with him I said look if you got a license from the state in a certification for the University first and now you're going to use that license to hold yourself out as a professional you have a responsibility beyond yourself if you see something that is a social risk good heavens this thing but kill thousands you must do something it must be something I don't have such great pretensions about myself that I had the time to think that all through I'm also selfish Uzi and selfishness sometimes is a good thing to have this was my building and my creation and I am very proud of it even today I mean there's nothing wrong with the design it's elegant that's like my child I have to save it it's automatic [Applause]

Channel: National Academy of Engineering

Views: 113,476

Keywords: ethics

Id: um-7IlAdAtg

Length: 69min 18sec (4158 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 01 2017