ABSTRACT

Topic: The New York disaster that never happened: How one phone call from an architecture student
saved the 915ft Citigroup skyscraper from crashing onto Manhattan during a hurricane
-The Citycorp building is a 59 storied building which was constructed in1977 with the investment of $195
million(USD)

- It was the seventh tallest building at the time.

-It is aluminum skinned and having cantilevered building corners.

-Challenge of building without demolishing the pre existing church nearby at the corners. It
was decided that column height will be more than the church height. So instead of making columns at
the corners they were made at the middle with the structural stability retained.

TECHNICAL DETAILS

Height (architectural) 278.90 m

Structural material steel

Facade material aluminum

Facade system curtain wall

Height (floor-floor) 3.89 m
Floors (above ground) 59

Floors (below ground) 3

This is a great mass of 7m3 and 350 tons of weight placed on the highest part of the building under the
sloping roof to 45 . This huge mass glides on a thin layer of oil and can correct the deviation of the
building due to the wind by 50%.

Hence they ran four vertical beams up the middle of the shafts of the building to these the attached
diagonal trusses that were connected to the corners of the building this allowed forces that were normally
concentrated at the four corners of the building to be transmitted along the diagonal beams to the central
beams.

Prospect of failure

Once in every 16 year extremely powerful wind with speeds of about 110 km/hr flows with the hurricane
that was almost going to destroy it let us see how

Let air flows from left to right than there will be tension on left side and compression on right side so it will
try to topple it down.
To avoid this problem mass tuned dampeners were used. One of the first ever tuned mass dampers -
a 400-ton concrete ball at the top of the building - that would compensate like a stabilizing force for the
movement in wind, was added.

But that was not sufficient to withstand the building in front of such a powerful wind from hurricanes that
comes every 16 years.

Fixing the problem

catastrophic design flaw was uncovered when an architecture student Diane Hartley phoned the building's chief
engineer about suspected failure.

He discovered that the building could not withstand high winds

Hurricane Ella began to form off the East Coast in August 1978 - launching authorities into action
Disaster planners believed that 18 blocks of Midtown would be destroyed if the building came down
Contingency plans were made in secret and the story was not made public for nearly 20-years.

Threat was more to this building since the connections inside the building were bolted connections and
the fact says that it is most vulnerable.If it would had welded connections than there will be more safer.

Welded joint vs bolted joint over quarterly winds

-40% increase in strain from quartering wind for welded joints

-160% increase in strain from quartering wind for bolted joints

Hence welded joint is preferred. So two inch thick plates were welded to two hundred bolted joints
and the citygroup skyscraper is safe till now.