Advanced Structure and Construction

3.0 Vertical Structural Systems Pt. 3

Types of vertical structural systems

The Monadnock Building

Pirelli Tower

Commerzbank

Bearing wall / pier structures

Pirelli Building

Gio Ponti with P.L. Nervi

Milan, Italy

1960

Mixed Use Tower

Frank Lloyd Wright

Bartlesville , Oklahoma

1952

Core / cantilever structures

Administration Building, Johnson & Johnson Co.

F. L. Wright

Racine, Wisconsin

1939

Standard Bank of Johannesburg, S. Africa 1970 Example of tall building with a core tree structure: floors are suspended from cantilevered arms in groups of ten floors.

Lake Shore Apartments (steel)

Stanhope Building (reinforced concrete)

Rigid frame structures

A rigid or semi-rigid frame will deform under lateral loads in two ways: a) cantilever bending and b) shear sway distortion The combination of these represents the actual behavior of the frame structure. Stiffening the frame with x-bracing, for example, will cause more cantilever bending and less shear sway

Core and frame systems provide adequate stiffness up to 30-40 stories. Generally cores are at the center of the building, both for practical reasons (daylight) and to resist shear forces more effectively. If not centered, they are usually symmetrically located.

Core and frame structures

Examples of tall buildings with cores in various positions. From left to right: Knights of Columbus Building (core at four corners), Inland Steel (core on one side), PSFS (core on one side), and Jardin House (central core)

Alcoa Building, San Francisco

Intl Financial Ctr, Shenyang

Hotel, Barcelona

Hearst Building, NYC

Trussed frame structures

First Wisconsin Center

Skidmore Owings & Merrill

Milwaukee, Wisconsin 1974

An example of a steel frame with a belt truss and outrigger system at the 15th and 41st floors, and a transfer truss at the 3rd level. Note that the outrigger trusses are in the direction of the wind only indicating that wind resistance in the longitudinal direction is provided only by the stiffness of the frame.

Diagrams illustrate the effect of belt truss and outriggers in stiffening a core-frame structure. On the right, the bending moment decreases in response to increasing stiffness provided by the belt trusses.

Myron Goldsmith

Superframe 80+ story high rise

The research on tall buildings at IIT (Illinois Institute of Technology) under Mies van der Rohe and Fazlur Khan of SOM led to new concepts on how tall buildings might efficiently resist lateral forces. Myron Goldsmiths thesis project proposes a super str uctural frame, detached from the envelope, and capable of resisting all the lateral forces at the perimeter of the building where it can do so more effectively.

Chestnut-Dewitt Apartment Building framed tube

Brunswick Building tube in tube

The Chestnut-Dewitt apartment building (Chicago, 1961-65) and the Brunswick Building (Chicago, 1962-66) were the starting points for Fazlur Khan and SOMs application of the concept of a framed tube structure for high rise buildings.

One Shell Plaza

Skidmore Owings & Merrill

Houston, Texas

1971

52 story office block tube in tube structural type. All lightweight concrete. Matt foundation.

Alcoa Building (Truss frame)

Skidmore Owings & Merrill

San Francisco, CA

ca 1965

Effect of increasing building height on weight of structure per unit area.

Effect of perimeter trussing to stiffen structure.

John Hancock Building, Chicago, USA

John Hancock Center

SOM / Bruce Graham / Fazlur Khan

Chicago

1970

Office level floors 26 - 33

Street level

Apartment level floors 82 - 92

Sky Lobby

floor 44

Sears Tower (Sears & Roebuck Co.)

Skidmore Owings & Merrill

Chicago, IL

1974

109 stories. Bundled tube structural concept. Height to width ratio 6.4.

Fazlur Khans structural systems classification Type 1 Shear Frames: semi-rigid and rigid Type 2 Interacting Systems: frame with shear truss, frame with shear belt & outrigger trusses Type 3 Partial Tubular Systems: end channel frame with interior shear trusses

Type 4 Tubular Systems: exterior framed tube, bundled frame tube, exterior diagonalized tube

There is more fun than anything else in doing a more elegant solution for an ordinary 75story building. We have a long way to go to make the skyscraper what it really can be, and it doesnt have to be super-tall to do this. There are ways to open up space, to make it more economical and to face the problems of fire and transportation and pedestrian joy at the bottom. These are much more interesting problems.
William LeMessurier Engineering News Record November 3, 1983

Citicorp Center

Hugh Stubbins / Wm. Lemessurier

New York City

1977

The base of the CitiCorp Center Tower has only a central concrete lift core and four mega-columns coming down to the ground. This creates an open through-block site that has been filled with public space, retail shops and a reconstructed church (St. Peters Lutheran) seen in the left foreground of the photo.

Engineer William LeMessurier designed the structure of the CitiCorp Tower as a braced perimeter frame with long diagonals on the facades in a chevron pattern (eight floors high) collecting and transferring the floor loads to the center of each face where the megacolumns below are located. These faade trusses collect about 1/2 of the gravity loads and resist the entire wind loads on the building. At the base of the tower, where the chevrons end, a diagonally braced transfer floor is required to transfer the wind shear (resisted by the chevron trusses) to the central concrete core.

In the typical floor framing beams run in one direction, girders in the other. Diagonals at the corners are required for stiffening due to the unique chevron vertical structure. Note the doubling of columns at the midpoints of the sides to carry the concentrated vertical loading transferred by the chevrons. The core above the base is steel framed. Below it is reinforced concrete.

The tuned mass dampening system of the CitiCorp Tower.

Comparison of types of building structures based on the bending rigidity index (BRI). See Ch.2 Tower and Office p.80

Bank of the Southwest

Helmut Jahn and Wm LeMessurier Houston, Texas

1982

IFC2

Rocco Yim, Cesar Pelli

Hong Kong

2002