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Old Posted Feb 25, 2012, 2:35 AM
JohnMarko JohnMarko is offline
Architect
 
Join Date: Mar 2011
Location: Henderson (Las Vegas)
Posts: 58
Quote:
Originally Posted by scalziand View Post
This reminds of the Hancock tower case in Boston. Shortly after completion, the windows started popping off en mass. An investigation was carried out to figure why. Hancock tower was one of the first towers to have an all glass curtain wall. AS such, the engineers who designed had very little experience with the kind of glazing required for the very large panels of glass in tiny mullions. It turned out that the glass right next to the soldering wasn't strong enough.

However, the investigation into why the windows were falling off also revealed that the tower had insufficient wind bracing!

Edit:And apparently I didn't fully read the first post.
Sorry, but this is incorrect.

The reason the windows failed on the JHC was because when they did the wind tunnel testing and engineering, they neglected to take into consideration the rest of the buildings surrounding it in the city!

The initial modeling and calculations were done with a stand alone building isolated in space!

Once they added the buildings to the testing model, they discovered the wind loading was severely inadequate, and adjusted their calculations accordingly, and everything was successfully completed.

It was not inadequate "soldering" or "gasketing" or size of the window panels - it was the whole installation "concept". And, no, the people who provided the installation were quite experienced in this sort of thing. They did not change the concept of the building structural "bracing" either.
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