N/A
Standard: £10 + VATMembers/Subscribers: Free
Members/Subscribers, log in to access
The Structural Engineer, Volume 6, Issue 5, 1928
Sir, On March 12th, 1928, the world was shocked, and the engineering profession humiliated by an awful disaster, the failure of the St. Francis Dam near Los Angeles, Calif. More than 200 people perished and a great property loss was suffered.
The Chairman sketched a section of the building referred to in the paper 50 ft. wide and 500 ft. high - and said that when one divided that into 35 stories one would appreciate the importance of what had been said about joints. Perhaps the author had not emphasised as strongly as he might have done what really happened as the result of wind pressure, and the Chairman drew curves illustrating the bending which would occur at the various heights in such a building. What happened at the top level, he said, depended upon the rigidity of the structure at the roof - whether one used a truss or a girder. If a girder were used, the effect of wind pressure was to reduce bending similar to that which occurred at the lower levels.
After six thousand years of development, the science of building, during the last three decades, has acquired two things that contribute more to business efficiency and human happiness than any it employed before. The use of one brought the other. Steel made speed possible. Speed has allowed building to change in direct. ratio with human relationships, which have changed and changed again with a rapidity previously never even imagined. Together they have given us the one distinctly new contribution to the world's architectural progress that we have had in centuries, the steel-skeleton skyscraper. They have made old methods useless and new ones necessities to solve the problems of planning and constructing our annual crop of taller end larger buildings. Harvey Wiley Corbett