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They're lucky that Laurent didn't sue them for breaching his copyright on the building design.
I wish I was joking. The ego of some architects eclipses even that of Steve Ballmer.
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Architects aren't engineers. Frank Lloyd Wright's 'Falling Water' house only still stands because the builder (IIRC) ignored some of Wright's specifications and installed additional building supports. I can truly see this happening... and if you went back to the architect later about the problem he'd just say 'but the design was correct!'.
Gehry is another example. I swear the Music Museum (whatever its real name is) in Seattle looks like something my cat threw up.
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Well, it seems pretty clear that he did in fact foresee the problem and try to bring it to the attention of the decision makers, and was overruled. That is, he told 'em so, and then when the thing went tits up, he told 'em he'd told 'em so. And then he told us. So?
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Terribly sorry. Next time you're too stupid or lazy to read the original post, I'll just keep quiet about it.
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The central building at my alma mater had a suicide door: it was on the wall of a stairwell, nearly to the fourth floor, and opened out into empty space (or would have, if it hadn't been pretty securely nailed shut). It wasn't an afterthought installation, though, just a leftover from the wing that used to be on that side of the building and which was substantially reduced in size when it was remodeled.
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I remember the story of a library once built without consideration for the fact that it would contain books... books made of PAPER. U of Cincinnati maybe? Anyway, they got the weight requirements correct, but neglected to account for the fact that paper oxidizes slowly over time. Without adequate ventilation, the cumulative effect of all of the books in a confined space was to remove a rather large amount of oxygen from the air.
They finally commissioned a proper air quality study after noticing how many students were falling asleep. If you’ve spent much time in campus libraries, I think you’ll know that this would have to be a rather large number of students to be noticed…
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For some reason the tail end of the story (water getting to the servers despite being moved well away from the source of the water) reminds me of Isaac Asimov's story The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline...
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"Have you ever worked or lived in a building of such an architect? If you had, you would believe the story to the letter."
Yep - architects are pretty type A. They can be brilliant, creative, artistic, and most know (either by training or natural skill) of structural concepts and what is needed to build a building that "works".
But all of that will be no match for stubbornness and pride. Which they can also have in spades.
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[quote user="Drone"]I remember the story of a library once built without consideration for the fact that it would contain books... books made of PAPER. U of Cincinnati maybe? Anyway, they got the weight requirements correct, but neglected to account for the fact that paper oxidizes slowly over time. Without adequate ventilation, the cumulative effect of all of the books in a confined space was to remove a rather large amount of oxygen from the air.
[\quote]
Now this one is hard to swallow. There's a difference between "inadequate ventilation" and "hermetically sealed".
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Flood on the 4th floor. I sure didn't see that coming ^^'
(By the way, it's Jacques Cousteau. Or Jacques-Yves, if you want to use his whole name)
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The college that I went to had a library designed by a famous archetect. It was built with two-story tall all-glass walls. The building was completely open inside, so the full height of the outside walls was exposed.
Of course glass isn't a really good insulator, even if double paned. On really cold winter days the inside of the glass got really cold too. The cold glass cooled off a thin layer of air next to it, and the cooled air sank to the floor. Therefore, whenever you sat at a table near any of the outside walls, you had a continuous ice-cold draft blowing on the back of your neck.
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Oh come on. The sinking library story is silly, but this just takes the cake. I can believe that anybody could be dumb enough to think this is true.
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Yes, it's absolutely impossible to believe that a professional could ever, ever make a mistake. Especially architects. Until this story came along, never, in the history of the world, has there been a reported case of a basement flooding. Why, next people will be spreading wild stories of buildings or bridges or towers collapsing because of design problems.
Excuse me, I have to run over to some other sites to post similar refutations of that wild claim about some boat called the "Titanic" or some such sinking because of a design flaw ...
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That's because they're being treated as businesses now, instead of places that... uhm... educate people. Money makes the world go round - but often in a retrograde direction.
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Architect are a joke, they make retarded plan and it's then up to the "real" engineer to make their crap fit and work together, it's quite obvious that the real wtf in those case is the existence of their position altogether...
catchpa: Enim: What a architect really understand when asked to design a mine (whatever it is, is actually irrelevant).
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I don't know. The story never says what was explained about the unique geography. A floodplain isn't exactly "unique", so I must assume something else was said to the architect.
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A similar story is told about the library at UMass Amherst. Supposedly it was not originally designed as a library, so the weight of books was not accounted for in the design, causing it to sink by some number of centimeters every year. Apparently this is completely false, but it is still commonly told as fact to prospective students on campus tours.
There is also a story that bricks are known to fall out of the building's walls at high levels (the building has 26 floors and is the tallest library in the United States) and injure passing pedestrians. This is apparently also false, but the University at some point put up a fence around the base of the building at a supposed "safe" distance, just to shut people up.
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I don't know if I want to pay for a dimension I'm not going to need.
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About 12 years ago I went to an interview for a development job at a large ATM network company in a South American capital. I arrived on time, only to find that the interviewer could not meet me because the ATM network had been down since early that morning, because of a flood. Their Tandem server was safe from floods, but the UPSs were in the basement, and apparently the water had caused the UPSs to fail in way that damaged the server (or servers), perhaps with an excessive AC voltage. Smoke came out from the server and it went down, leaving nearly half of the ATMs in the country unable to operate.
When someone (not the original interviewer) finally came to talk to me, she told me about the problem and repeatedly said "We'll be on the news today". Before we could begin with the interview, someone else came with the news that the had finally fixed the Tandem server and were bringing it up. I don't remember much about the interview, only that they offered me the job and I rejected the offer.
After that, I learned not to put mission-critical equipment in places where flood or rain combined with unexpectedly strong winds can damage them
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I am reminded of Heinlein's And He Built a Crooked House Hypercube.
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can believe this - my old Uni has a Tower that sways quite a lot in the wind visibly from view from inside), they stick ( or did) the Architecture students on the top floors to remind them to pay attention to the local conditions .
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Correction: he's in charge of the servers. The basement (in general) would be part of Facility Management.
So yes, while it would be Smart to put some mitigating plans in place, you're also cripped by the fact that no-one will fund any plans since there isn't supposed to be a problem. (And you're definitely not going to have money in the budget for any structural changes since that's literally not your department).
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like any article by Remy, its not complete without the Unicorns that pop up all over your screen !
The articles posted by Remy have driven up the quality of posts here lately in my opinion, thanks for joining tdwtf
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Not only are they built with grant money they're built to attract more grant money.
And lets face it, a modern looking "cool" building that is almost impossible to function in attracts more grants than a solid brick cube that's perfectly functional.
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Reminds me... the railway station in my home town was due to have its platform extended in the mid 90's. I'd moved out many years before, so can't vouch for the accuracy of the story. Originally the plan had been to extend the platform north, link it with a level crossing and thereby simplifying access to it for a great deal of people. But as the story goes among the locals, the engineers at the government agency in charge of railway infrastructure turned the blueprints the wrong way. Allegedly they recognised their error much too late, and did what they could to salvage the situation. The result: a monstrous one kilometre platform running southwards, with no other access to it than the old crossing at the station, and tall fences to keep the vexed townspeople off the tracks.
Incompetence and oversight is ever present in all aspects of life, even those where aesthetics aren't involved.
Captcha: wisi. Our faults?
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I work somewhat near the john hancock tower, in boston, which was designed by the famous Henry N. Cobb, who worked for the most well known and respected architecture firm in the country at the time. The building actually became known more for its flaws than anything else. In fact it was widely considered an embarrasment of modern architecture and the architecture industry itself.
Some of the issues included:
Panes of glass popping off and falling to the street
Nauseating sway. If you worked on the upper floors vomit was not a concern. It was a daily occurence.
Foundation breaking and causes damage to utilities and the historic trinity church.
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Perhaps it's a pseudonymn based on the fact he had to go all "holy-diver" on their asses.
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In germany they have a saying:
Bauingenieure sind die armen Schweine die ausbaden dürfen was Architekten in ihrem Gestaltungswahn anrichten
Construction engineers are the poor guys (lit: poor pigs) that have to pay for what architects produce during their conceptional delusions
And more often than not this is true. Like the archi who wanted a "flat roof". So the lift ends at the 7th out of 8 floors. (Schunter Student home, BS)
Another wanted "flowing lines" so no wall in that building is straight, no component standard. This includes the shower/wet cells that had to be special designed (APM studen home, BS)
The guy who wanted to "break up the monotonus corridors" ending up not only with a maze of corridors and lifts that need special color coding to be used but also with spiral staircases that have no nearby elevator and half-floors (Bank, D-dorf)
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Give it up Laurent, everybody makes mistakes. It's O.K.
Captcha: genitus - The design was "genitus" but unfortunately not very practical.
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yeah, 'cuz nobody saw the punchline coming the instant the words "server" and "basement" appeared in the same sentence.
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This sure as hell wasn't U of MN - Duluth. Our campus pioneered the CS program of UMN, and we still have one of the shittiest buildings on campus (and are being squeezed out of it by greedy neighbors). Definitely wasn't UMN Twin Cities because their CS dept is less than ours and they don't get that kind of rain.
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I've worked in a CS building that was retrofit and another that was built new. In the retrofit one, I visited one day and was informed by the guys working there that there were serious leaks in the roof - and this was confirmed by the previous occupants of the building. I informed the (not-really-) responsible administrator of this, and of the fact that there would be a pile of computers in the building and he just laughed. Said the architect had assured him there would be no leaks. Sure enough we moved in, got a pile of rain and a whole bunch of (mostly desktop) machines had to be replaced - on department budgets, of course because certainly it wasn't going to come out of his budget.
In the new building (built primarily for a CS program) we had insufficient space for network cables, so had to have cable trays (generally a good thing, but it would have been nice to build them in) installed, then extra power for our server room had to be added after a couple of years, then we had to (expensively) refit the server room for extra cooling. The grad student cubicles were fun too - it took about two minutes to take off the panels - so anyone could go in and get student papers, desktop computers and well, pretty much anything else.
Far too many architects don't care about the needs of the users of their buildings, they're just looking for more stuff for their design portfolio and making things look good is more important than usability.
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The other difference is this one is full of anticipated problems.
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Yes, but this is story from The Daily Worse Than Failure, as Alex has pointed out is the real name for this site. The building itself was deemed a success, and it's subsequent bug fix was also deemed a success. But there are things far worse than success.
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Let's be fair to the poor architects -- sometimes it's the builders who fsck up the plans instead of making them work, as happened with the Citicorp Building.
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FTFY
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"Up? There is no up! The server room is in the basement. Nothing heavy need go upstairs; we have no need for a freight elevator."
This sentence reminded me of "sucking is not possible."
(Along with "There's no crying in baseball" and "Do or do not; there is no try.")
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From earlier in the article:
Sure, the builders cut corners, but how hard is it to find the sun? Even in NYC?
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The liberal arts school in my home town installed what was supposed to be an olympic sized swimming pool. They intended it both for training their athletes and had hopes of hosting qualifying events.
Somebody did their math wrong. Forgot to calculate the thickness of the pool lining or something, and it wasn't until the building was half-complete that they realized the finished pool was going to be about a foot short of regulation length. Oops.
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Whoops. Sorry. This legend has been refuted. Thanks for playing.
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Umm, learn to read? Jason's story has nothing to do with a sinking swimming pool, but with incorrect measurements that resulted in the pool not being long enough.
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Captcha: quis? - I'm talking about myself of course.