skyscrapers are too dangerous

In My Humble Opinion
1

I don’t think the WTC Towers should be rebuilt exactly as they were. Skyscrapers are f*****g impractical! One image that is especially strong in my mind is that of people clinging to the side of the building, desperately trying to avoid flames that were hot enough to melt steel girders and collapse one of the world’s biggest buildings. These were the people who jumped to their deaths, because they didn’t want to die a slow horrible death in the flames.

This sort of thing has happened in New York before. In 1911, seamstresses and garment workers jumped to their deaths when there was a fire on the top floor of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company. The building, 10 stories tall, was considered and called a “skyscraper” in 1911. New York responded with labor and safety legislation, years before the New Deal. Fire escapes were installed on tall buildings.

But, how do you put a fg fire escape on a fg 1,000-foot tower???

Boo to skyscrapers!! They are a hundred-year fad that must pass. Very tall skyscrapers can barely keep themselves in running water, they sometimes “pancake” in earthquakes, and they kill your leg muscles when the elevator breaks. On top of it all, they are deathtraps. There was no way for rescue workers to reach those trapped people, unless they wanted to spend so much time getting up there that they got caught in the deathtrap themselves (which happened to about 200 of them).

And besides that, they are magnets for terrorists, sticking straight up like somebody’s big macho dick, just inviting someone to play Lorena Bobbitt (like appalled architects and angry neighbors). Maybe the designers of these big phallic objects DID have something in mind, hmmmm??

Maybe the new WTC should be built DOWN. Layers of concrete on top to guard against plane crashes, nuclear missiles and meteorites. Warrens of escape tunnels running in all directions. Walk a few feet to the subway. Sunlight shafts and greenhouses. Best of all, no shadow to obstruct a Manhattanite’s precious sunlight. And no earthquakes in New York.

Examples of subterranean (or partially so) structures: the George C. Page Museum in Los Angeles. The I.M. Pei structure at the Louvre. NORAD in Colorado. Bush’s safe spot in Nebraska. The research facility in Michael Crichton’s “Andromeda Strain.”

If they can get running water to the 110th floor, they can solve the water table problem, and it would be a better use of their talents.

2

Tall buildings are a good resolution to the fact that in areas like Manhattan, there is little land to build on.

I, personally don’t like tall buildings but it’s a matter of practicality. I don’t poopoo the idea of more buildings like the WTC, I just think we need to figure out why we had this attack.

Yes, earthquakes, terrorism, fires and weird things will happen but a buildings size was never a concern when it came to terrorism until the early 90s. You also have to note that plenty of “sky scrapers” are built around the world. This just happened to be a target, a bad place to be on Tuesday. It’s not about the structures themselves, it’s about terrorists wanting to make an impact. An impact they certainly made.

3

The only other option is to build our structures underground.

4

The workers in the Triangle Shirtwaist factory were locked in by management. Available fire exits were deliberately sealed.

5

Ummmm You want to list all the skyscrapers and then list all the terror attacks on them and see if they are ‘magnets for terrorists’?
I think terrorists have done more planes and far more carbombs in various places then atacked sky scrapers.

So we should ban cars right?

6

Zebra, my sarcastic friend, I think it is true that attacks on skyscrapers are becoming more of a trend.

My principal preoccupation is that there is NO ESCAPE from the top of a skyscraper when the s**t starts flying quickly. That’s why I prefer cars to airplanes, mortality statistics be damned: you have a better chance of escaping quickly from a totalled auto than from a totalled plane.

Yes, SPOOFE, I think we should go underground (see OP).

7

Certainly the way to avoid this kind of attack is for everyone to live in identical suburbs, with no buildings that are worth caring about. While this describes about 99% of the US already, I’m glad there are areas like Manhattan, and I’m glad there are notable buildings that people love.

You might say that the skyscrapers are particularly bad to evacuate, and very vulnerable, etc. That’s true. However, in a crowded area like Manhattan, perhaps there was something gained from the density of population as well - which is there is a lot of people around to help.

Aside from considerations like these, skyscrapers are very efficient in terms of space taken up, and how they work with public transit, etc. Also, and this is my personal opinion - they are beautiful, and the skyline of a city with many tall buildings is very special. It’d be a shame to abandon that style of architecture because, in essense, people like them so much that they are targets for those who want to piss Americans off.

8

**

Ok I’ll drop the sarcasim but I’ll try to be friendly.

**

Even though this is IMHO I really wish you would back up this claim about trend on attacks on skyscrapers with some proof.

Also your claim that skyscrapers are inhierently unsafe I would like some sort of proof. The fact of the matter is that 1000s of people safely evacuated the WTC on Tuesday.
[sub]Look, some people on this board work in, or next door to a skyscraper. So starting hysteria about terrorist attacks on them being common (which they are not) or them being inhierently unsafe is not a good thing. Not now.[/sub]
Your friend

Zebra

9

Me being a BASE jumper recognizes there is a quite easy escape. Some friends of mine have gotten serious inquiries to purchasing BASE rigs for just a scenario–using a round parachute instead of the squares we use.

http://mtnpix.tripod.com/images/www_DougBlane_com_105.jpg

10

http://mtnpix.tripod.com/images/www_DougBlane_com_105.jpg

I can’t edit my posts. I can post though and mu user/pass is right…

11

CaelNCSU, not to worry; editing posts is turned off in most (maybe all, but I don’t frequent all of them so I can’t be sure) of the forums here. If you see something that calls for a minor correction, do as you did; if you see something that calls for a major correction, just ask your friendly local mods to fix it for you.

12

Feel free to spend your workdays underground if you so desire, but I’ll stay up here where I can look out a window and see the world. In a place like Manhattan, you’ve got to build up or down. When you build up, you can create a beautiful, robust structure like all of Manhattan. When you build down you create a bunker which will never be occupied because nobody in their right mind would rent a basement office.

As for skyscrapers being “magnets” for terrorists, WTC was around for over 25 years before this with only one failed terror strike. The rest of Manhattan is composed of skyscapers, and no one has tried or succeeded in destroying any of them.

Moreover, even if you were right and skyscapers are irresistible targets for terrorism, the answer is to stop terrorism, not to stop skyscrapers. The one thing I keep hearing is that if we live in fear of these sons of bitches we are letting them win. I say build 'em twice as high and let them stand up like a gigantic middle finger telling the world what we think of terrorists.

13

My point was that building underground is far more impractical than building up. How many times in the history of the skyscraper has one been demolished by a terrorist attack? Heck, a military bomber once crashed into the Empire State Building, and it didn’t fall. The WTC attacks is the exception, not the rule.

You do not understand what you’re talking about, basically. Skyscrapers ensure the most usage out of a small space. I say, make the damn things BIGGER! Make them three thousand meters tall and give them a base covering ten city blocks! Then NOTHING short of a nuclear blast will even dent the damn things.

14

Actually Spoofe isn’t far off. Frank Lloyd Wright propsed building a mile high skyscraper in Chicago. He envisioned a city of 5 or 6 such buiding and using all the land saved for parks and such.

I will admit I am a skyscraper nut. I love 'em. I so wanted Donald Trump to build the new one in Chicago and make our city the tallest again

Now if he does build it’ll be in NYC.

Chicago’s buildings are build more for symetry(sp?) and are of different types that make it almost art.

NYC’s buildings are build to be TALL and canyon like. You really don’t get that canyon effect in Chicago like NYC. Which in itself is cool.

That is the one thing I didn’t liike about the WTC. It didn’t seem to have a personality like the Empire State or the Cryster building or even Woolworth. You can look at those and see stories about them.

WTC seemed to say I was built to be the tallest and built to be practical. Having been to the top of both the Empire State and World Trade there is a feel about the Empire State that was lacking in the WTC. Sadly those who never been to either won’t ever know now.

15

Oh yeah one other thing the Pentagon isn’t a skyscaper.

The White House, Camp David and the Capitol were said to be targets and they aren’t skyscrapers.

I think it is the WTC was the symbol of the financial capital of America.

16

If skyscrapers were as wide as they were tall, that might solve some of the problems I’ve referred to. A fire could break out on one floor, and the rest of the same floor might not be affected. The running water problem could be solved by collecting rainwater and letting it flow down instead of being forced to pump it up 100 stories; and if the pyramid were large enough, it might even have its own climate, with its own controlled evaporation and condensation. Basically you’d have a huge, gigantic, colossal pyramid of the sort often envisioned by science fiction writers, like the pyramids in 1984 and Blade Runner, but without the negative connotations.

But I think there must be a reason Frank Lloyd’s vision was never acted upon. I just don’t think it will ever be practical, or safe, to keep extending a narrow needle into the sky until it becomes top-heavy. Unless, it were connected to a geosynchronously orbiting satellite by a tether, similar top the space elevator Arthur C. Clarke has proposed. Or unless we perfect the artificial antigravity field.

I still don’t think the WTC should be rebuilt exactly as it was. I don’t want more forced suicide jumps of the Triangle Shirtwaist/Sept. 11 2001 variety.

17

It’s true that large modern multi-storey buildings can be vulnerable to terrorist attack but they don’t necessarly have to be skyscrapers.

In Manchester the IRA terror group exploded a bomb, thankfully during the night when hardly anyone was around, and this devastated the area, much of it had to be rebuilt at huge cost.

In London, bombs exploded by the IRA devastated the Canary Wharf and Lloyds buildings causing much devastation and immensly expensive reconstruction.

Although the buildings did not collapse the damage was so great that many had to be demolished.

Looking at other large buildings the US embassy in Kenya and Nigeria spring to mind, these were flattened as was the one in Beirut.

When you look at earthquake hit zones it is even more striking, in Mexico one of the enduring images is that of the main hospital in ruins and many trapped or crushed inside.

The biggest condemnation of current large building techniques has to be the earthquake at Tangshan, China, where the precast concrete buildings gave way and killed up to 255 thousand people.

Yet it is possible to construct large buildings that are less vulnerable to such disasters, the last earthquake in San Francisco showed this up where many older buildings collapsed, especially when the ground liquified beneath them and those designed to the earthquake construction codes stayed up.

It comes down to cost.

18

You’ve hit on one thing, there (and you probably don’t realize it)… all the skyscrapers are completely isolated from each other. I hold to the notion that there should be etensive settings of catwalks and supports, hundreds of them, between buildings. This would, A: allow a person to walk from one building to another, fifty floors up, B: allow for elevated roadways in the vicinity of highly urbanized areas, and C: would allow each building to serve as a sort of “buttress” for each other.

19

Perhaps we could build mega-bunkers in major cities…though it’s not such a great view when you look out the window, and it would probably be a lot of work to reroute parts of the sewage system.

20

A friend had a very attractive idea along those lines, Spoofe: gardens atop buildings (not necessarily skyscrapers; possibly just medium-sized buildings, but maybe connected to skyscrapers) linked by greened walkways, creating a sort of overhead park. I don’t think this would work terribly well in practise (shadows? wind? suicide?) but it was still an interesting thought.