Home Insurance Building, Chicago - tallest skyscraper 1884-1890. Demolished in 1931.
New York World Building - tallest skyscraper 1890-1894. Demolished in 1955.
Manhattan Life Insurance Building - tallest skyscraper 1894-1895. Demolished in 1964.
Singer Building, Manhattan - world’s tallest structure 1908-1909. Demolished in 1968.
“Any fool can design a bridge that doesn’t fall down. If you want a bridge that barely doesn’t fall down, you need an engineer.”
The Ulm Minster was taller than the Home Insurance, New York World & Manhattan Life buildings. You’re right about the Singer building. That’s the only one other than the WTC to have ever been the tallest in the world ever demolished.
The main idea of better structural analysis has been to come up with lighter structures that are strong enough to meet anticipated design needs. So there’s some truth to the common idea that they ‘aren’t as well built’, and that can be of practical significance in some cases with regard to un-anticipated design needs. The (old*) WTC failed spectacularly, in an unanticipated situation, but one which arguably might have been anticipated, which older buildings might have resisted better, and which has been reflected in the design of subsequent buildings.
Bridges were also mentioned. Another category is ships. Some ships of recent decades have proved to have structures too light for all the needs of service over a long period. Improvements in structural analysis and use of higher strength steel nominally resulted in simply lighter structures equally able to meet anticipated requirements. However when the potential for corrosion and physical damage of thinner plates is factored in, and the adverse interaction of stress and corrosion, the ships were not necessarily well built practically speaking. There’s been a general trend back away from high strength steel in merchant ships for that reason. Of course there’s no reason to avoid continued improvements in structural analysis per se.
Also back on WTC, I worked on a high floor in that building for some years up till after the first bombing in 1993. The building would move around in high winds enough to make some people nauseous, or at least unsettled and distracted from their work. This was a less dramatic but practical drawback relative to the ‘over-designed’ and considerably stiffer ESB, in which I’m told the motion is not as noticeable (I’ve only been up there as a tourist a few times). Likewise many modern extremely tall buildings make more use of stiffer (as well as more fire resistant) steel reinforced concrete.
*the ‘replacement’ building is now named ‘One World Trade Center’, close enough to ‘The World Trade Center’ to potentially create confusion when using the present tense to refer to the destroyed building as at least one sentence in the thread did. I assume every reference though is to the building which existed until 2001, designed 50 yrs ago, decades after many other surviving skyscrapers but not exactly the most modern.
Modern skyscrapers are much more earthquake-resistant than older ones, because they’re designed to flex. Not really a consideration in New York, but a Big Deal in other major cities (such as Tokyo).
The steeple tower of Marienkirche in Germany (tallest building in the world until 1647) once fell down. True, the entire building was never demolished, but its tallest part didn’t exist for a while.
I believe there is also the issue of traffic capacity with the Tappen Zee.
And the fact that it was built in a horrible location so the state of NY wouldn’t lose out on toll revenue to the Port Authority.
That article claims that the bridge was built “about as close as it could be” to the Port Authority’s territory, a 25-mile circle centred on the Statue of Liberty. It claims it is two-tenths of a mile outside the circle, which is nonsense. Measuring on Google Maps, the closest point of the bridge is 27.2 miles from the statue.
None of those were the tallest building at any time. The Eiffel Tower (1889) was taller than all of them. And all structures that have been the tallest in the world in recorded history are still standing – except for the WTC.
I think the “25 mile radius” is an approximation. It’s not the actual boundary:
http://www.panynj.gov/about/facilities-services.html
There’s a big difference between a “structure” and a building. A tower with an observation deck is not a “building.” A radio tower is not a building. See the definition in Wikipedia’s history of world’s tallest buildings.
Also, I believe none of these tallest buildings has ever survived a terrorist attack.
The Empire State Building did survive an aircraft crash, but that was a B-25 which has an empty weight of 19,480 lb and a max takeoff weight of 35,000 lb. Fuel capacity was something like 2000 lb.
The Boeing 767s which crashed into the weighed at least 228,000 lb at time of crash, 74,000 lb of which was fuel (source).
Sorry, that should have been 49,000 lb of fuel (for flight 175).
Yep, it’s a BFD that blocks and blocks of 20–50 floor buildings not fall down in earthquakes here. There haven’t been any really big buildings put up in Tokyo (WTC towers were 100+ floors) but there are a lot of mid-height buildings, and quite a few residential towers are 15–30 floors.
For reference, that video was taken in the Tokyo area during the Tōhoku quake; local intensity readings were near the top of the scale. I was on the 9th floor of my in-laws’ 15-floor apartment in the northern suburbs of the greater metro area for some of the aftershocks. Just with mid-6 readings on that scale, there was appreciable sway. On the other hand, basically nothing fell down, though there was some damage, especially to older (1960s, 70s era) buildings.
Our apartment was on the 4th (top) floor of an old concrete building and — while nothing actually fell apart — there was visible damage to the building and everything inside the place ended up looking like Hulk was having a bad hair day. There was less shaking at my in-laws’ place than our much lower structure.
Apples and oranges. A B-25 WWII Bomber is a very small aircraft compared to a modern jet. Plus the top speed of a B-25 is under 300mph. Also, the fuel capacity is no where near what a commercial jetliner carries. I suspect that the WTC building would have survived a B25 strike just fine.
friedo makes a good point that only the good buildings have lasted, and the bad ones are long gone. Same for bridges, the old ones aren’t necessarily better just because they’re still around. In many cases they’re replaced because of capacity and safety (such as narrow width or clearance) issues, not necessarily overt structural problems, but there’s still issues that early designers couldn’t have foreseen.
An interesting local example that so far has yet to come to a head is Cincinnati’s John A. Roebling Suspension Bridge. It was the longest suspension bridge in the world when built in 1866 by the father of the later Brooklyn Bridge’s engineer. Like many suspension bridges, the main cables rest on saddles atop the towers, and part of the saddle design includes rollers that allow the cable to slide due to shifting weight. So for instance, if you have a heavy load going across the middle of the bridge, it pulls down on the deck and the cables between the towers (the main span), which then lifts the cables and deck outside the towers (the approaches) so long as the cables can slide easily.
Apparently the rollers on the Roebling Bridge are frozen, either due to poor design or debris accumulation, basically fixing the cables to the towers. So with a heavy load in the middle of the bridge, it instead pulls the tops of the towers closer to each other. This gradual rocking back and forth is none too healthy for unreinforced masonry, and there’s concerns about it eroding away the footing as one of the towers is not on bedrock but sunk into the compacted gravel riverbed. The addition of a second set of cables and new truss deck in 1896 for supporting electric streetcars only complicates matters.
The incredible mass of the towers and a rather low 11-ton weight limit for crossing vehicles (plus a 30-foot minimum spacing for trucks) have helped it survive, but time will tell if its able to hang on or not.
That brings up a good point. There were spectacular engineering failures as long as people have been building things. The Leaning Tower of Pisa is a famous example.
There was also the Tacoma narrows bridge disaster in 1940. It oscillated so much in a not so powerful wind-storm that it collapsed in a shocking way. There is no way you would want to be caught on that bridge when it went through complete failure conditions.
Modern engineers are not immune to incompetence though. The I-35W Mississippi River bridge in Minneapolis was extremely busy and just flat-out collapsed in 2007 without much warning killing 13 and injuring 145.
I always roll my eyes when people are anxious are about going across large bridges or to the top of large buildings. That isn’t really fair though. It is completely possible that they really will just collapse and kill them.