William M. Greenburg
A new book contains details never published on the design of defective structural engineering and the construction of the Citicorp Center High Rise in Manhattan and the secret night repairs made in the summer of 1978.
Episode remained a secret to New Yorker Article in the magazine in 1995, after which it became a touchstone in the ethics education of engineering based on the actions of the structural engineer William Lemessturier.
Alert for curious students without connecting to the project team that was bewildered by the design, Lemessurier finally realized the danger: a possibility of failure one by 16 if they are exposed to powerful winds that acted diagonally on their sides. He later consulted other engineers, informed the owners of the problem building and saw repairs until the end.
The author, lawyer and popular historian William M. Greenburg, now shows more of the less -like machinations and motifs, behind the scenes than the New Yorker Article or stories after Enr. The resulting story is, therefore, more complex than the article in the magazine and decreases some, But not all, of the honor associated with the admission of Falla de Lemessurier.
Lemessurier, who died in 2007 at the age of 81, is the center of action. But there is a very rich context: from New York to the 1970’s and the role of failure in structural design progress.
In the investigation The Great Mecalculation: The Race to Save New York Citicorp Tower (Nyu Press: $ 27.95), Greenburg dug in a private file of Lemessurier, as well as notes made by writer Joe Morgenstern New Yorker The article headed “the crisis of fifty-nine flats”. Greenburg describes the unusual innovative design, derived from the need To keep in place a small church in the place. The engineer made a part of the tower framed in steel. Greenburg Write in detail the roles of two students, one in architecture and the other in engineering. The engineer, Diane Hartley, in particular never spoke to Lemessurier, but raised problems that he finally alerted him to his failure considering the possibly devastating burdens that could be imposed on diagonal or quarterly winds.
The new reading of the material and its Greenburg interviews with Lemessurier’s relatives and associates provide many new views on the crisis and the most controversial engineer’s internal motifs to help hide the nature of the repairs of the public – and enrd – that was justified at that time to avoid panic.
Greenburg found the main file record preserved by Lemessurier, labeled Project Serene, an acronym for the special review of engineering for events that no one predicted at the Harvard University Graduate Design School, where the engineer’s roles are being held. Morgenstern gave Greenburg grace its interview notes since 1995 New Yorker Item.
Adding to the history of the Citicorp tower
In a telephone interview with Massachusetts, Greenburg described his approach. “I wanted to add something new,” he said. Until then, the history of the Citicorp tower “focused more on the ethics and aspects of professional responsibility of the case, but Most readers will find that I try to focus more on human interest instead of engineering details, “said Greenburg,
Many interviews mixed with the narrative are several who question the judgment of Lemessurier in its design and its design and construction process.
There are also less comments than the former offices director of his New York office, who, after joining the firm after his job, was complaining that he was unjustly perceived that he had something to do with mistakes. A member of a member of the joint engineering company in New York with the signature of Lemessurier said that the company of Lemessurier was responsible for the basic design concept and the significant change of the steel construction team of the winding connections soldered from the original design with the screws. Without this change, there would have been no emergency. Lemessurier stated that he had not been consulted about change.
This switching connection can be the key to what happened. But the fragmented construction process that let him pass (Lemessurier had said he never knew who he did calculations for the switch) could be so guilty.
One of the most innovative skyscrapers in a city full of them, known for its angular crown that was part of a design by the architect Hugh Stubbins: the project seems to have been built with a stricter separation between design and construction of what would be needed in a pioneering and bright design. The necessary teamwork between the practice of Lemessurier’s Cambridge, Mass., His joint company engineer in New York City and the Ector and Prime steel contractor, also seemed to be missing and recalls what happened in the failure of Kansas City Hyatt Walkpese in 1981.
Can you ask where the engineering review or construction inspection that would have called for the presence of the connection switch and communicated it to Lemessurier? Quoting a story to ENR, Greenburg states that Lemessurier “confessed only because he did not provide enough supervision to his staff during the project.”
Lemessurier and the design and construction process defective and fragmented in all its dimensions are found as a less impressive thing than a single person’s heroic ethics lesson. Although one of the great structural engineers in the world, Lemessurier also understood that the error and repair of the Citicorp tower would be his legacy as much or more than the buildings he designed.
But now with Greenburg’s book, the truths and ironies of Lemessurier’s famous confession can be seen and taught more completely.
