• Captain Obvious (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous

    Learn to read, idiot. It's right in the article that Diogo DID EXPLAIN HOHOHO

  • Captain Obvious (unregistered) in reply to The Nerve
    The Nerve:
    a) Not adequately warning about "local geography".
    Learn to read, asshat. He took this to the top, but was overridden because the starchitect has STAR POWERS, which seem to be on the same power as your inability to read english.
    b) Not taking proper action to save the computers.
    How does one combat water in a poorly designed building? Installing pumps won't stop a flood from coming in. The pumps will just run.. and run... and run.. until it burns out. Then you're building is dead anyway. That's assuming you can even run lines for pumps to remove water from the building. It's a glass design, so cutting would have to be involved, since the architect didn't bother accounting for it.
    c) Failure to come up with a decent compromise.
    What is there to compromise? The only way to remove a problem of this scale on a poorly-designed building... is to demolish it and build a new building. Some fuckups you just can't save, no matter how hard you try. Which sounds like a story of the life of "The Nerve", which is why they are so defensive of starchitect.
  • not even 5 yrs experience. (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous

    sadly, just like there are dumb programmers, there are also dumb architects?

  • da portuguese (unregistered)

    I wonder if this is not a Portuguese thing involving Portuguese politicians!?

  • Kempeth (unregistered)

    Considerations architects are capable of incorporating in their designs:

    • must not fall apart
    • should look good

    Beyond that, you have to think for yourself...

    Things that architects are especially bad at:

    • not making the building into giant solar ovens (especially for schools)
    • making sure windows can still be opened once the rooms are furnished according to their purpose
    • applying any kind of considerations that go beyond living/sleeping/bath room
  • Peter (unregistered) in reply to Someone You Know

    I was there when they built that, and for the next six years.

    Bricks: This was a Massachusetts state contract, so all kinds of shenanigans could have (and probably did) gone on. The story I heard about the bricks was that the builder saved by not using enough ties to hold the brick facing to the cast concrete building. When the building flexed, bricks cracked and fell. I personally saw brick fragments on the ground outside the building. In addition to the fence at the base of the building, the building had a "basement" level which extended out beyond the tower footprint. This area was placed off limits due to the fear of falling bricks punching through the roof/plaza.

    It was designed specifically as a library. Books were not on all floors, some were designed as study floors. Elevators did not stop at all floors and were notoriously erratic (and slow). I never heard anything about overloading being an issue.

    Ventilation was poor. Floors were small and cramped, with narrow corridors and tiny study closets. It was not a pleasant place to work. I maintained Teletypes for the Computing Center, which connected to the mainframe over 110 baud modems and dialup lines. They threw off a lot of heat from the motor. With the door closed (to keep the noise down), the temperature in a terminal room rapidly rose to intolerable levels.

    There were at least two suicides (one of which I witnessed) off the roof of the building while I was there.

  • Dan Foresman (unregistered) in reply to Zaratustra

    The only information you're going to get in any circumstance, is information about what used to happen before the architects showed up, built stuff, and displaced the natural absorption of rainwater by the soil. Wasn't a flood zone last year is the only conclusion anyone can really draw everywhere. Sympathy for the Architect. Never. Like sympathy for BP. Just a sign that natural selection may be tapping you on the shoulder pretty soon.

  • Not always wrong (unregistered) in reply to Steve
    Steve:
    I never said it didn't happen, I said it happened a lot less often and I stand by that. Linking to one example of a failed architecture project proves absolutely nothing - this website alone contains thousands of examples of failed software projects.
    Steve, I'm afraid you're wrong.

    I work in an industry where we commission a lot of both new and old buildings.

    Every single one of them has at least one stupid decision from either the architect or primary constructor. The vast majority have multiple.

    And that's only the ones I notice - I don't see the whole building, so there will be many others.

    They vary from the big things like a vehicle-lift that has stairs up to it from the street entrance, to sprinkler systems or lights directly above and totally blocked by ductwork, via large windows that are practically impossible to clean.

    Doors to nowhere are extremely common though.

  • Not always wrong (unregistered) in reply to Calli Arcale
    Calli Arcale:
    Anonymous:
    This says absolutely nothing about whether the regular flooding was explicitly outlined to the architect. There's unique geography around here too but that's no indication of the annual rainfall. Clearly there is a lot of room for interpetation here which is exactly why I said I'd like to hear it from the architect's perspective.

    There is that, but there is a very common tendency among people of all expertises to underestimate (sometimes fatally) the power of water. The guy's last job was supposedly in Dubai; I expect a rising water table is not a particularly big concern there, on the edge of the Rub' al Khali. He would not be the first architect to make such a mistake, nor will he be the last.

    You'd be surprised how much flooding Dubai and Abu Dhabi get.

    It's a lot of fun driving around aquaplaning your hire car!

    • Unless of course there are any locals around. They don't know how to handle it...
  • Mark (unregistered)

    This reminds of the time my school was closed because it flooded and the transformers where in the basement...

  • Spuffler (unregistered)

    Faith. The architect had faith that the environment was irrelevant, faith that his knowledge and his skills superseded Diogo's familiarity with the situation. The university had faith that the architect was not unaware, faith that any error would be minimal Diogo had faith that a practical man could do better.

    I have no faith in engineering where a design is halted by any of management imposed limitations (been there, done that).

  • Your Name....? I Don't Know English; Sorry. (unregistered)

    Suck's To Be You Man, I'm Going Home.......(Door Slams)...(Buring Car Tires)

  • Neel Kumar (unregistered)

    My alma mater had a very fancy building built. It featured a freight elevator with the requisite powerful motor but the doors were made too narrow... It also figured a LOCKABLE conference room but it had no walls and anything said there echoed around the atrium. Sheer insanity.

  • Valued Service (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous
    Anonymous:
    Don:
    For the clueless among us, I'll quote the definition as per Princeton Worldnet "study of the earth's surface; includes people's responses to topography and climate and soil and vegetation"

    Yes folks, climate is part of geography. Did our protagonist understand this definition? Probably so;

    There you go - probably. In other words, you're just guessing like the rest of us. Thanks for your input and everything but my exact point was that there is not enough information here to know definitively what information was exchanged between the university and the architect. You can guess, I can guess, we can all guess but that's all it is - a guess. When I say "I'd like more information" that doesn't mean "I'd like more guesses from random strangers with no knowledge of the actual event".

    If architect says put equipment in the basement, and the guy in charge of the servers says it's a bad idea, and the architect doesn't bother to find out exactly why...

    It's the architect's fault.

    The guy in charge of the servers kept asking for a freight elevator, you give him a freight elevator.

    The architect ignored project requirements. That's the WTF here.

  • eric bloedow (unregistered)

    reminds me of a story in a book, "partnership" by Anne McCaffrey: the protagonist was told to look for "a disaster waiting to happen" and invest her money in a company that would profit from cleaning it up. she found a company like this one, whose "corporate standards" required keeping their computer equipment DEEP underground, "where it would be safe". so she invested in a nearby company that specialized in recovering data from damaged computers: "crash and burn data recovery, ltd."

  • Thread Necro (unregistered)

    Reminds me of the story of my Alma Mater's CS building.

    Brand new, opened in 2009. That winter, as if the gods were angered by the college's hubris, the 'big flood' hit. You see, the whole city is built on a bog, it's where it's native name comes from. City officials are coming up with plans to minimize the impact of floods in the future but at the time, a flood like this was out of the norm. (It didn't help that the dam upriver released water way too quickly but that's another story)

    The college gym and CS buildings were worst hit, sitting more or less on the riverfront. There was no amount of retrofitting that could've saved them.

    The CS building, inexplicably, kept its servers in the basement and much like in OP's story, they flooded. I wasn't even a student at the time, let alone being involved with the planning in any way so I can't give you the same insights at OP but I can tell you that the servers were moved to the first floor (second floor for you yanks) with well sealing doors and (we were warned) a fire-suppresant system that sucks the oxygen out of the room.

    A college society I worked with has some horror stories of the IT/CS department that I might have to share some time :)

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