The Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, Ohio, caught fire, in 1969. Randy Newman wrote a song about that. This week, in London, UK, things in a neighborhood in London are burning, the heat being supplied by a new, tall building that—for lengthy periods of the day during at least part of the year— focuses sunlight down […]
Tag: building
How to disassemble a skyscraper, chapter 2
There’s a new state of the art of disassembling — rather than “simply” dynamiting — a building tall enough to be called a skyscraper. The old, albeit seldom-if-ever-used method is shown and described in David MaCauley’s book Unbuilding. We described it here not so long ago. The new approach is a more mechanized version of […]
Earthquake-activated house-levitating pneumatic system
The Air Danshin Systems company of Japan says it offers pneumatic technology to protect buildings in the event of an earthquake. The shaking triggers a stream of air that levitates the house. The diagram below, from the company, shows to some extent how the system works, with blue representing the stream of air. (The Spoon & Tamago blog […]
Bacterial Builders, Inspired by Ancient Pyramids
The title of this study speaks volumes (albeit a bit cryptically): “A robotic micro-assembly process inspired by the construction of the ancient pyramids and relying on several thousand flagellated bacteria acting as micro-workers,” S. Martel and M. Mohammadi, IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, 2009, IROS 2009. 10-15 Oct. 10-15,2009, pp. 426-7. (Thanks […]
How to disassemble a skyscraper (if you have the money)
The engineers who designed and built the very tallest, most skyscraping skyscrapers said very little about whether – let alone how – someone could safely disassemble such a colossus, should the need arise. About the only person who thought about it long and hard was the writer and illustrator David Macauley. Decades ago, Macauley published […]
Resonance: Aerobic exercisers shake skyscraper
Resonance is a simple physics concept (which can be expressed in lovely mathematics). Two Korean news reports tell about a recent example: Aerobic exercise blamed for tremor at Techno-Mart A form of aerobic exercise performed by dozens of people caused the vertical vibration felt in certain floors at Techno-Mart, a 39-story shopping mall in Gwangjin-gu, […]