Once upon a time, seven wonders of the world stood tall and brilliant
and, it must have seemed, would stand forever, impervious to time and
gravity. Now only one remains--the pyramid at Khufu, in the Egyptian
desert near Cairo. All of the others have fallen down. Modern
technologies, computerized designs, and new materials have minimized
structural failures nearly to the vanishing point. Even so, we can learn
from ancient as well as recent history. Why Buildings Fall Down
chronicles the how and why of the most important and interesting
structural failures in history and especially in the twentieth century.
Not even all of the pyramids are still with us. The Pyramid of Meidum
has shed 2,500,000 tons of limestone and continues to disintegrate.
Beginning there our authors, both world-renowned structural engineers,
take us on a guided tour of enlightening structural failures--buildings
of all kinds, from ancient domes like Istanbul's Hagia Sophia to the
state of the art Hartford Civic Arena, from the man-caused destruction
of the Parthenon to the earthquake damage of 1989 in Armenia and San
Francisco, the Connecticut Thruway bridge collapse at Mianus, and one of
the most fatal structural disasters in American history: the fall of the
Hyatt Regency ballroom walkways in Kansas City. Buildings have fallen
throughout history whether made of wood, steel, reinforced concrete, or
stone. But these failures do respect the laws of physics. All are the
result of static load or dynamic forces, earthquakes, temperature
changes, uneven settlements of the soil, or other unforeseen forces. A
few are even due to natural phenomena that engineers and scientists are
still unable to explain or predict. Thestories that make up Why
Buildings Fall Down are, finally, very human ones, tales of the
interaction of people and nature, of architects, engineers, builders,
materials, and natural forces, all coming together in sometimes dramatic
and always instructive ways in the places where we l
