Economically speaking, should one look up to the businesspeople who build skyscrapers, or look down at them? Calculation is involved in reaching the answer obtained in this study: “A Game-Theoretic Analysis of Skyscrapers,” Robert W. Helsley and William C. Strange, Journal of Urban Economics, vol. 64, no. 1, July 2008, pp. 49-64. The authors explain: […]
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 […]
Muslims who live in skyscrapers must calibrate the sunset according to what floor they live on, according to a mufti, according to a report in The National: Fatwa means late iftar on top Burj Khalifa floors … In a fatwa released over the weekend, the Grand Mufti of Dubai called upon Muslims living in skyscrapers, particularly […]
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 […]
In the race to top the top, to build a tall building that’s at least momentarily taller than all the other tallest buildings, a two-part question lingers. These towers are so costly, and the real estate market so unpredictable, that one or more of these buildings could turn out to be financial failures. Then might arise […]
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, […]