 So, yeah, so I have lots of things I kind of wanted to do, and this being the last one, it's like, well, let's hit some of our high notes and invite some of our most favorite speakers back, and that list includes Ernie. And Ernie is known for doing these soft talks, right? The ones that kind of give you perspective and meaning and kind of help you formulate like this is, you know, why we do things. And I was like, Ernie, would you like to come back and talk? And he said, absolutely. And he said, what would you like to hear? And I said, I would love to hear an actual technical talk from you. And so he's like, great, I'll do one on architecture. I'm like, fantastic. And so he's going to give like a really detailed talk about systems architecture using a skyscraper metaphor, and I am so excited. So Ernie, thank you. Thank you for coming back and you're entrusting us with your talk. OK, hello, hello. OK, let's start this timer because God knows I'm going to fit this in 45 minutes. OK, so I hate to break it to you, but I want to start off with a quick disclaimer. This talk is not about skyscrapers. You may think, but Ernie, you just showed a slide a moment ago that said this is how to build a skyscraper. The very first slide said it was about skyscrapers. No, trust me, it's not about skyscrapers. And in fact, it's really very important that we remember this as we go through this talk. So I'm going to ask for your help as we go through this. I want you, when you see this slide, to simply read it out loud. So let's try it now. This talk is not about skyscrapers. OK, we've got it. I do find this interesting, though, as I started to do the research for this talk. I stumbled on this Wikipedia is where you start research for all talks after all. And the problems posed in skyscraper design are apparently among the most complex encountered because you have to balance things like economics, engineering, construction management. I find that really interesting. So the first skyscraper that we're going to talk about is the equitable life building. It technically doesn't even qualify as a skyscraper, but to be fair, the word skyscraper was once a term that was used for a very tall horse, very tall men, or even very tall hats. So I think that we can give a seven-story, 130-foot tall building a pass. Now, the equitable life building was the tallest in the world from 1870 to 1884. And it was built and owned by the Equitable Life Assurance Society of the United States. But that's a mouthful, so if you'll permit me, I'm just going to call them equitable from here on. Equitable, being a life insurance company, were experts at assessing risk. And so it's important to note here that they had determined that their building was fireproof. We'll come back to that later. Its basement housed saves and vaults filled with several billions, and I do mean billions in 1870s dollars of securities, stocks, and bonds. And to put it simply, the Equitable Life Building was the center of most of the wealth of the New York financial district, and it showed. This building was gorgeous. Tenants in their building included bankers and lawyers, and it even had an exclusive lawyers club, which is what you see here. In fact, they really only had one problem. Can you spot it? The problem is it had stairs. And a lawyer on the seventh floor of a building would find he had no clients, if in fact they had to climb six flights of stairs to see them. Thankfully, a solution to this problem already existed. A gentleman by the name of Elisha Otis, who was first and foremost, had a beard to rival Mike's, I think. Really? It's a very nice beard. He was a tinkerer along with his sons. And at age 40 in 1851, he was managing the process of converting an abandoned sawmill into a bed frame factory. And so while cleaning up, he was looking into how he could get all the old debris up to the upper levels of the building. And now hoists and elevators existed, but they had one really important flaw. If somebody cut the rope, then whatever was on it was either broken or dead. Seemed like a problem. And so he and his sons designed what they called a safety hoist that wouldn't fall to the ground if it broke. And the interesting thing about it is it had these teeth in this rail that was on either side of it. And there was a spring inside that top mechanism there so that when the rope was cut, if tension was released, these pegs would shoot out and they would catch in those teeth. Now, he didn't think much of it at the time. He didn't patent it, didn't try to sell it. And he didn't even ask his managers for a bonus for this thing. But three years later, the bed frame business wasn't going so well. And he was looking to try something new. So he formed a company to try to sell the elevators. He got no business for several months. And then came the 1854 New York World's Fair. And he saw a great opportunity to be very dramatic and to do a presentation of how this thing worked by having a helper actually cut the rope and show that everybody's excited, like, we're going to get to see somebody die. I guess it's like what people do with NASCAR, right? Like, it's all about the crashes. But so he had a great opportunity to do it. I want to point this out, too. This is a pencil drawing. So I think this might qualify as the world's first photobomb. I'm not really sure what that's about. So anyway, these elevators weren't perfect. They ran on steam engines back in that day. And they required someone that meant to keep them constantly fueled. But even though it would be a while before they were updated to run on electricity, the equitable company had actually realized this was a huge deal for them. Because it had great potential for an office building. Previously, the lowest floors in the building were, in fact, the most desired by tenants because they were the easiest to access. But a company leasing space in its office building then would need to, if they wanted a good return on investment, take all the upper, less convenient floors. And so now, there's a safe way to travel up and down from these highest floors. And the highest floors also happen to be the ones that have the most light, the most fresh air, the most distance from road noise. And so this literally turned the value proposition for buildings completely upside down. And all of this was the result of something that Alisha Otis didn't even think was a very big deal. It's just a really good thing he decided to share it with other people. So anyway, we were talking about the equitable building. The one that was built as fireproof, the one that had billions of dollars in its basement. This is the Café Savaron. It was a really swanky cafe in the building. And on January 9, 1912, just after 5 AM, the winds howling 40 miles an hour with gusts up to 68 miles per hour. Already, the temperatures that are below freezing are much colder now due to the wind chill. And Philip O'Brien, the timekeeper for the Café Savaron, starts his day by lighting the gas in his small office. And he distractedly throws the still lit match into the garbage. By 5.18 AM, the office is engulfed in flames. The flames spread to the elevators and the dumbwaiters. And within minutes, the entire equitable building is on fire. The fire department arrived, but the water, as you can see there, was actually freezing on the building as they were trying to put it out. So the building was utterly ruined. And so it was that the building that was built as fireproof was lost in a fire. And any history buffs that are out there right now might recognize that 1912 was also the year that an unsinkable ship was struck in iceberg and sank. You'd think two disasters in one year would be enough to teach us to stop making these kinds of grandiose claims. But next skyscraper we're going to talk about is the Home Insurance Building. It was built in 1885. The architect that was tasked with building the Home Insurance Building was William LeBaron Jenny. And the story goes that Jenny left work unusually early one day. And his wife was startled, a little concerned that maybe he had gotten sick or something, jumped up to greet him. She sat a heavy book that she was reading on the birdcage. And inspiration struck. And I kind of always read this line like it's being said by King Arthur and Monty Python and the Holy Grail talking about coconuts. But if so frail a frame of wire would sustain so great a weight without yielding, would not a cage of iron or steel serve as a frame for a building is supposedly the revelation that he had. Now the Home Insurance Building is considered the father of the skyscraper and was the tallest one in the world for four years, up until 1889. It was built of cast iron columns and rolled iron beams forming a framework up to the sixth floor. Steel beams were then used from seventh floors through 10 floors. The majority of the curtain wall. So in these buildings, you build a frame and then you hung the masonry like a curtain off of the frame so that most of the masonry was not bearing load. However, not 100% of the masonry wasn't bearing load in this building. Most of it was hung from the frame, though. So this made the building drastically lighter, about a third the weight of a full-on masonry, load-bearing masonry building. Something as simple as a birdcage led to an idea that would change everything about how we were going to build skyscrapers from that point on. Of course, if you were a New Yorker, you didn't necessarily call the Home Insurance Building the first skyscraper. If you were a Chicagoan, you sure did. And so there was a lot of drama around this. But here are these people in Chicago and they're building this awesome building on an iron and steel framework and it's clearly a technical accomplishment. And more importantly, it's serving both their needs and the needs of many other occupants. And yet, it was easy for people to come along after the fact and debate just how big an accomplishment it was or whether it was really the first one. This is Leroy S. Buffington. He doesn't look like a very cheery guy, does he? Maybe that's because he claimed he had the same idea back in 1881, except he didn't actually build it. He applied for a patent in November of 1887 and it was awarded in May of 1888. Now, by this point, this technique was already in very wide use. Buffington actually started a company called the Iron Building Company for the express purpose of pursuing lawsuits against builders that were using this means of construction. Now, yet here is a picture of a flax mill back in 1797 that used iron framing. So it sounds kind of like prior art to me. But you know, that didn't stop Buffington from trying to extract money from anyone and everyone who might pay. But again, next guy's grape we're gonna talk about is the Monatnick Building in Chicago, Illinois. Now, the Monatnick Building was being built by two brothers. They were from Boston. Their names were Peter and Shepherd Brooks for whatever reason, I could not find a picture of Shepherd. You can tell they're wealthy though because Peter has an oil painting of himself. They hired a guy by the name of Owen F. Aldis to be their property manager and manage all of their investments. And Peter only ever visited Chicago once. They relied on Aldis for all their information. Somehow they still thought it was gonna be the biggest city though in the world. Now, Aldis recommended that they hire Daniel Burnham and John Root. These were the imaginatively named Burnham and Root to design the building for Brooks. And so Burnham's a pragmatic businessman, but Root had a flair for the artistic. So here's a sketch for the building that was drawn back in 1885. And it was then gonna be a 13 story building with Egyptian inspired ornamentation, you can see here. Now, Brooks was known not just for being extremely wealthy but also for being extremely stingy and liking simplicity. And so Brooks insisted the architects were refraining from any kind of elaborate ornamentation. And in fact, he didn't want any protrusions on the building at all because he said they just created places for pigeons to nest. I'm not really sure what his big problem with pigeons was but he really didn't like them, I guess. Now, when Root's on vacation, Burnham has another draftsman, a junior draftsman, create a simpler drawing. So Root comes back from vacation, he's not terribly happy about this, right? His beautiful architecture had now been ruined. But eventually he decided to throw himself into this design anyway and he said, he declared that the heavy lines of the Egyptian pyramid had captured his imagination and he would throw the thing up without a single ornament. But by embracing that constraint, Brooks was able to not fight against it but use it to inspire and to actually stay invested in his work. Now, you can see, I mean, here's the thing, right? Root is still an artist at heart and he couldn't quite give up entirely on ornamentation. So you have these protrusions, I'm sure they're gonna create places for pigeons to nest. But Aldous was able to sell Brooks on this idea because he said that it would increase rentable space. So you can see those little places that stand out there. And in fact, the height of the building was calculated by determining how high they could feasibly make it while having sufficient space to rent due to wall thickness because this was a load bearing masonry building. So the more building you put on top, the thicker the walls had to be at the bottom. And in fact, the walls on this building had to be six feet wide at their base. And on top of that, Chicago had soft soil so they had to devise a special sort of raft system that sat underneath the foundation to sort of float the building on top of this soft soil. So here's what the building turned out. It looks pretty much like the sketch. You'll see it's a little longer there. It was built in two parts later. It ended up being 17 stories tall, including the attic. And it was tallest of any commercial structure in the world at that time. Now, still, it is the still the largest load bearing iron frame or iron frame building with a load bearing exterior masonry wall that way. Now the building was designed to settle eight inches but by 1905 it had settled that much and quite a bit more and they ended up needing to reconstruct the first floor. And then by 1948, it had settled 20 inches. So it resulted in a step down. So the street actually had a step down to go into the first floor. And guess what? In 1967, it turns out that they found it to be sinking. I don't think it ever stopped. I don't know why this is such a revelation to them but apparently it was still sinking. So profitability is one really important factor to consider when you're building but it can't be the only one. But again, next skyscraper that we're gonna talk about is the Fuller Flatiron building. It was built in New York. It was built also by Daniel Burnham but during the time that the Manhattan was under construction, route passed away. Burnham was still in business and his new company, DH Burnham and Co, designed the Fuller Flatiron. He worked with associate Frederick Dinkelberg there to build the building. Now, it was originally just called, supposed to be called the Fuller building after the then recently deceased George A Fuller but locals insisted on calling it the Flatiron. Now I assumed it had to do with what it was being built from or something like that but it was actually a lot simpler than that. It just looked like a Flatiron. And at the tip in fact, it was only six and a half feet wide. This is one of the corner offices looking out from that tip and it definitely necessitated a different shape for the building because they had this triangular plot of land they were building on. But if the Monatnok building had required walls that were six feet wide at its base and this thing at its tip was only six and a half feet wide you were gonna have a problem here. You're gonna lose a lot of rentable space. So it required a different approach and you may notice that the walls are nowhere near six feet thick here. So it's really better to have an oddly shaped building than half of a building. But to do that, you need to choose the right materials for the job. And in this case, it wasn't masonry but steel. So the Fuller Flatiron was built on a steel frame. Now, you know, looking at the photos you might not be terribly surprised to hear that the locals at this time were calling this Burnham's Folly. They were actually taking bets on how far the building's debris would fall would actually fall whenever the first windstorm came along. But an engineer named Corridan Purdy was involved in this project and he had already designed bracing that was tested to withstand four times the force that the Flatiron would ever encounter. During a 60 mile per hour windstorm in fact that hit soon after the first tenants moved in you couldn't feel the slightest vibration in the building. And in fact, one tenant went so far as to say that not even the filament in his light bulb was vibrating. But, you know, that didn't really surprise the engineers at all that were involved in the construction because they'd tested it. Everyone else was downright amazed. Again, so now we have a twofer. We're gonna talk about two skyscrapers. 40 Wall Street and the Chrysler Building, both of them in New York. Now, these two guys, H. Craig Severance and William Van Allen were once partners in another firm. They had very different personalities. Van Allen was the type of guy who preferred to spend his time with other architects discussing the finer points of design. He was, again, artistic, kind of like Root was. Severance, on the other hand, he spent his time with business folks strumming up sales and humility, as you might be able to tell here, was not his strong point. He had no particular passion for architecture as art. And yet, when Van Allen would get all of the credit for some of the intricate designs that they had built and they were jointly responsible for, after all, they couldn't be built without the money, he didn't take it very well and their partnership ended badly. Not only that, they soon found themselves in competition with one another. Severance was commissioned to design 40 Wall Street while Van Allen was commissioned to design the Chrysler Building. Now, you're probably familiar with the Chrysler Building, but you may never have heard of 40 Wall Street by that name. Maybe this will help. It's yet, it's called the Trump Building today. Back then it was known as the Bank of Manhattan Trust Building. So, Severance had assembled a bit of a dream team consisting of his associate Yasuo Matsui and consulting architect Shreve and Lamb during the design of 40 Wall Street. Now, on the other side of this, Walter Chrysler had William Van Allen do all the design for the Chrysler Building. But one of the interesting things was that Chrysler was super involved in almost every aspect of the design. In fact, he paid for the design and the construction of the building all by himself, even though it was being built for his car company because he wanted to be able to let his children inherit it. He was so obsessed with every detail because he later called the building a monument to me. So, he saw it as representing himself. So, you might notice here, there's no surprise that the initially announced heights of these two buildings, 40 Wall Streets a little bit higher than the Chrysler Building makes sense because the Chrysler Building announced first. And so, they announced earlier by a month, 40 Wall Street already is one-upping them, no surprise. In October of 1929, Severance had been visiting the site of his construction and his building was just about to catch up with the Chrysler Building. The building, the Chrysler Building had slowed because they were putting the first two arches of the top of the building on top of it. And Chrysler had the press already announcing that the steelwork was complete, even though it really wasn't, to make the Chrysler Building just barely the tallest one in the world at 850 feet. So, by announcing completion of the steelwork, they could get some free press that they were already the tallest. Now, Severance wasn't terribly worried about this because he had already put in motions, plans to build much higher than he'd originally announced. The month was filled with all sorts of skyscraper announcements. Everybody was announcing they would build something high. There were people announcing they would build skyscrapers over a mile high during this era. Van Allen was quiet because he, Chrysler, and a few others knew they were building higher than anyone else expected. In the third week of October, Severance caught wind that someone had spotted a 60-foot flagpole on top of the Chrysler Building. So, he raised the building's plans again because he needed to make sure he took into account that extra 60 feet. This was enough for the press to declare a winner. So, the Bank of Manhattan Building was scheduled to top out on November 12th. Chrysler Building's dome, you can see in the excerpt from the article, was making it so that it wasn't really possible to actually make the building any taller. And so, the Bank of Manhattan Building was to be topping out at 925 feet, and the Chrysler Building would be 20 feet shorter than that. And this was all including the flagpole because Severance made sure they knew about it, too. Except, the flagpole on the Chrysler Building wasn't a flagpole at all. The flagpole was one part of a 185-foot 27-ton steel spire that Van Allen had been calling the Vertex. He'd had it built off-site in five pieces and shipped to the building on separate occasions, hoisting pieces up and lowering them down into the dome's fire tower on the 65th floor where they were partially assembled. Then, on October 23rd, they hoisted the base up, riveted the rest of the pieces in place within the next 90 minutes. Van Allen and Chrysler went to sleep that night knowing that, in fact, their skyscraper was the tallest in the world. The best part was nobody even noticed when they put this up. They worked to keep it that way, in fact. They made no official announcement, and, meanwhile, people on the ground thought the spire was just a really tall crane, not part of the building. So, it was that on November 12th, the headline in the New York world read that the world's tallest building was, in fact, the Manhattan Trust Building. It was only till four days later that the Dow Service's daily building report, which is normally like a trademark devoted to such interesting things as the price that building suppliers charge all over the country, breaks this article that the Chrysler building was over 238 feet taller than anyone else thought. And, after it was all said and done, the Chrysler building beat out the 40 Wall Street by over 100 feet, close to 120 feet, in fact, and they both cost a small fortune to produce at 13 and $14 million apiece. So, I think for a moment about how much extra expense was incurred on these buildings, constantly adding height just to win against a rival. And, to make things worse for the winner, Chrysler refused to pay Van Allen the standard 6% fee upon completion of the building, and that would have amounted to $840,000, and it was all because he hadn't entered into a contract when he received the commission to build the Chrysler building. Now, prior to completion of this building, Chrysler would have paid anything to win that race, but once he won it, he just didn't seem worth that extra expense. And Van Allen ended up having to sue him to get paid. It more or less destroyed his career. The story of his victory ended up as a cautionary tale for other architects, and in fact, today Van Allen has no major studies dedicated to his work, and he's little known in the history of architecture, and on his death, The New York Times didn't even publish an obituary. But again, another interesting skyscraper is the Empire State Building, also in New York. Back in August of 1929, remember, this is before we'd completed either of the other two buildings we just discussed, rumors started circulating that the new developer was gonna take over the site of the Waldorf Astoria hotel that's pictured there. Now, Al Smith was former New York governor who ran against Hoover, and he had invited John Raskob to chair the Democratic National Convention after Raskob ran his campaign. Raskob was VP of finance for General Motors up until 1928, but he resigned after he was ousted by a man named Alfred Sloan, because Sloan was a supporter of President Herbert Hoover, and he said it was a conflict of interests. So Raskob sold his GM stock to finance a building. He made Smith the president of Empire State Company. Now, Smith had a flair for the dramatic, and this is how he announced his involvement as president of the Empire State Company, and that they would be demolishing the Waldorf Astoria and raising a new 80-story at that time skyscraper, The Empire State Building. It was gonna be the tallest in the world. But remember, this was around the same time everyone else was saying the same thing, so nobody really paid it too much mind. Now, speaking of those months, remember these two guys? William Lamb and Richmond Shreve were part of the group that was actually building 40 Wall Street at around the same time, and another architect, Arthur Loomis Harmon, joined up with him in 1929. By October 2nd, 1929, again, this is before some of the last minute height increases in the other buildings, Lamb was in a meeting with some of the richest men in New York, and he had already built a scale model of a new skyscraper to show them, and the demolition of the Waldorf Astoria had already begun as well, so they were already well underway. Now, Lamb was artistic, much like Van Allen and much like John Root, and his partnership with Shreve was not unlike the former partnership of Van Allen with Severance or of Root with Burnham, but he was also pragmatic, and you can see here that he's looking at the considerations that were given, specifically the time and exterior constraints that he had to work with, and those determined some of the characteristics of the design. And so, this is not new, right? Whenever you're given tight concessions, usually, or tight deadlines, you need to be ready to make concessions. So initial drawings, in fact, were created in two weeks, and a final design was reached in four, and what was really interesting about this is unlike most building plans, they designed the floor plan from the top down. They set a standard for light in the interiors, and then they designed from the top down, placing emphasis on how pleasant it would be to work in that space. So it's really important to determine how, what things are gonna matter, and they weren't willing to sacrifice lighting, ventilation, or other things that would make the property valuable and appreciated by those people who matter. There were certain things that needed to be true, no matter what other concessions they might make. Now, who matters? Well, they're the present and future occupants of your building. They're people like her, they're people like him, and they're people like him because if the building can't be maintained, and it's not gonna be very good for very long, occupants can come in all shapes and sizes, in fact. But just because someone is big, strong, loud, and wants to use your building to puff themselves up, that doesn't mean you should put their needs above the greater good. Now, one reason the building's designs took shape so quickly was they were able to use parts of designs that had been done for other buildings. This is the Reynolds building in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. It was designed by a Shreve and Lamb previously, and this is the Kiru Tower in Cincinnati, Ohio, designed by another firm. These are scale models, and you can see the similarity in the design. You can see how they sort of picked and chose pieces of one building or the other to construct their new building to arrive at the final design. It's really important to be able to reuse previous work, and you don't have to be snobbish necessarily about where it comes from. So, November 18th, 1929, Al Smith had just announced the purchase of land adjacent to the Waldorf Astoria, which, of course, meant to everybody's minds that they had to be building higher. They needed a bigger base to build from. And Shreve, Lamb, and Harmon wanted to keep the height down because they wanted the building to stay usable, because if you kept going higher, what you ended up having to do was have tenants switch elevators midway, up or down the building, and just in order to make it to the top floors. And so, the next day, Smith announced five floors were gonna be added because Raskob, the guy who was financing the whole thing, still wanted to add height, even though the designers told him, we really should stop here. And he said it was gonna go up now to 85 stories and 1,100 feet. Now, that was an overestimate by about 50 feet, but it didn't matter. And again, Shreve is still saying to the press that it's going to be based on the sound design and the sound development of usable space. Now, John Raskob's sitting in his office, and he's looking at this plaster model that the architects had given him. And like every client ever in the history of ever, he decided he knew how to solve the problem. And reportedly, he said what this building needs is a hat. Now, the hat he had in mind wasn't a literal hat, but a mooring post for Zeppelins to be able to dock and let passengers on and off at the top of the building. Now, it would be even better than the Chrysler building's spire because it had a practical use, practical, practical use. It would need, after all, another 200 feet. So again, we're staying true to this notion that we're only gonna make use of the sound design of usable space, and it would let them stay true to those claims. So you'll notice, though, how Al Smith couldn't help but slip in that final height of the building whenever he made the statement about their grand plan to add the Zeppelin mooring tower. And you know, never mind the feasibility of docking a Zeppelin in the winds of New York City at that height, or what would happen when the Zeppelin needed to maintain an even keel and had to dump several hundred gallons of water on the people below, and in case you aren't aware, water weighs something over eight pounds a gallon. So we're talking about well over a ton of water being dropped onto pedestrians down below. But Raskov had to build the tallest building. This plan was going to add $750,000 to the cost of this building. But because it had marketing appeal, especially at this era, everyone was obsessed with flight. The architects had basically no say in it. Raskov and Smith were determined it was gonna happen. And so this obviously would frustrate Shreve, who really wanted the design to be dictated by practicality and not publicity stunts. But with the designs completed, it was time to start building. Did you notice something interesting about building? It doesn't really matter that, you know, you designed from the top down, you still sort of should build from the bottom up because after all, everything you build has to sit on top of something else. Now, your definition of bottom might not be the same as mine. It could change depending on what you're building on. But the only way to make sure the structure's gonna stand is to build on something already standing. But it's important to be honest with yourself. If you have an entire ecosystem and your own building as well built on, while you understood the bottom to be the top of someone else's building, don't complain when the bottom gets yanked out from under you. And by the way, during the act of building the Empire State Building, steelworkers put an amazing amount of work. They were the real heroes who turned this design into a reality. They worked under incredibly stressful conditions and under a really tight schedule. They didn't always even have time to take, or take time really to put in appropriate safety nets. And sometimes the support that they did have didn't seem terribly fit for purpose. And sure, they got to have lunch, but they didn't always get to leave the work site. So, construction of the Empire State Building started on March 17th, 1930, and it proceeded for about 14 months. And the building rose at a rate of four and a half stories per week, which was a record speed at the time. So 14 months after construction begins, building opens and it ended up holding the record for the world's tallest skyscraper for almost 40 years. Notice how short-lived Van Allen's record was? It had just been made the year before. And they completed this monumental feat with only five deaths. Now five deaths on record seems almost low when you look at the scale of the project, but even one life lost is too many. But again, another interesting building we're gonna talk about is the United Nations HQ. It's considerably smaller really than Empire State, and it was constructed from 1948 to 1952. Now compared to 14 months for over twice the size for the Empire State Building, it gives you some idea of just how fast they moved on that previous building. But do you notice anything about the building? It's all windows. And they wanted lots of light, of course, so they decided that they should use mostly sealed windows for that. Now the problem is that a building with mostly sealed windows largely resembles a greenhouse, and light with light comes heat. And unless you're building a greenhouse, you don't want the heat, you just want the light. Because it doesn't really matter if your building looks really nice and if you have great light, if nobody can stand to be inside it. So the solution to this had started years ago in response to a problem encountered by a printing company in Brooklyn. Their paper was getting wrinkled by humidity, and in the end result of that was that the print would be misaligned due to printing on wrinkles. An engineer named Willis Carter came up with a solution in 1902, and it worked by blowing air over, I'm sorry, Willis Carrier, came up with a solution in 1902 that worked by blowing air over a set of coils, and they were filled with a coolant. And so it really even wasn't designed to cool anything, but it was designed to regulate humidity, but it just happened to do both. He patented under the name apparatus for treating air, but we later came to call it air conditioning. Now, this wasn't the first idea that anybody had had to do this. In fact, the first space to use a similar cooling mechanism for the comfort of people was the New York Stock Exchange, way back in 1903, actually, and it was designed by Alfred Wolfe. And you can tell, I mean, it's a pretty busy place. You can understand why they went with air conditioning. But these were expensive. This one weighed 300 tons. It was a huge device. And in 1922, Carrier had improved on the original design, on his original design, with a centrifugal chiller. And so it was much simpler. You had increased reliability as a result of that. It was smaller, it was cost-saving, right? Without this, a building like the UNHQ could have never existed. And this is important because it doesn't matter if technology exists if virtually nobody has access to it. But again, another skyscraper is the Willis Tower. You may know it as the Sears Tower. Again, we're back to Chicago. It was designed by Fazlur Rahman Khan. He was the structural engineer that was tasked with building this office complex for Sears. It needed to support all of their Chicago employees, which meant it was gonna be an extremely tall building. And Chicago is known as the Windy City. Gus from Lake Michigan can reach up to 55 miles per hour. And the taller you get with a steel skeleton building, the more susceptible it is to bending at high winds. And that swaying motion that's created at the top can make you literally seasick when you're on land, when you just happen to be in a building at high elevation. So Khan had developed something called a tube structural system. It doesn't look much like a tube, but the general idea is very tube-like. It takes all of those skeletal kind of construction and members and it moves them to the exterior, which frees up not just a lot of extra space for use now because you don't have beams going through the middle of your building, but it makes it into an exoskeleton. So it gives you much better resistance against wind. Unlike Mr. Lobster here, though, the exoskeleton he has isn't really winning any beauty contest. Khan's exoskeletons gave a whole lot more flexibility in building design, and further evolutions of his work have allowed for some really beautiful buildings to be constructed, to the point where it becomes a work of art, really. But it wouldn't have been possible to build this high without having a fixed shell to guard against all the wind. Now, the Sears Tower specifically was the first building to use Khan's bundled tube structure, which was just what it sounds like, a bunch of smaller tubes, nine separate buildings of various heights that were essentially just strapped together into one building. The end result was that even with wind speeds over 55 miles per hour, the top floor of the Sears Tower sways only six inches. So this is just an interesting takeaway from that, I thought. But again, another skyscraper we're gonna talk about now is the Taipei 101. Now, the Taipei 101, 101 stories, which is why it's named that, it sets near the Pacific Ring of Fire. Now, the Ring of Fire is the most seismically active on Earth. It gets hit by an earthquake roughly twice a year, and earthquakes are different than wind. They affect, because they affect the building at the foundation, they're very, very strong effects on building structurally compared to wind. It's very easy for an earthquake to essentially break a large building. And this means it's really important to be able to test various types of structures on an earthquake simulator. So it turns out that spaghetti models steal quite nicely, as it turns out, and it has similar kind of structural characteristics in terms of how it bends under load. So I'm gonna show you how they can test these things on something that basically generates, simulates an earthquake. I think this is really cool. People get to play with this stuff, but. Now, the structure looks pretty much intact, but if this had been a real building, the top floor would have fallen down and killed everyone inside. The structure was too rigid, and so it transferred too much vibration to those upper floors. Now, the industry has a term for this kind of failure. The industry calls this the catastrophic failure. Now, I find this really interesting. You have to test all modes of failure in both the laboratory and the real world, but the only way to know of all modes of failure is to learn from previous failures. So somebody has to die first, essentially, for us to know that this is possible. So no engineer can be absolutely sure that the given structure will resist all loadings that could cause failure. All they do is decide that it's acceptably unlikely. Think about that the next time you're on the 30th floor in an office building. Somebody decided the chance of failure of that building is acceptably unlikely. So we should probably test to ensure catastrophic failure is acceptably unlikely, and please, please, please set a very high bar for acceptably. So the designers of Taipei 101, they made it rigid where it had to be, and flexible where it could afford to be. So here's a typical floor plan, just one floor off of Taipei 101. They built a core for the building out of 36 rigid steel tubes, and they included eight mega columns, the ones that you see in red right there. They were pumped full of concrete. Now every eight floors, outrigger trusses would be rigged up to the columns on the inside to connect them to the ones on the outside, and they essentially acted like rubber bands. So the building could do a little bit of a shimmy when it needed to. Now, on March 31st of 2002, a 6.8 magnitude earthquake hit Taipei while they were still building the building. It destroyed smaller buildings all around it, and it toppled two cranes from the 56th floor of the building under construction. But they were able to resume construction after an inspection showed absolutely no structural damage had occurred, and the engineers claimed in fact that during a quake Taipei 101 is the safest place in town. So you'd be surprised how flexible you can really afford to be. And of course, that flexibility is desirable in withstanding a quake, but you can imagine how sick someone might get if they're on the top floor of the building and the whole thing is swaying back and forth like a reed in the wind. So they actually have three tuned mass dampers. This is the largest one pictured here. This one suspended from the 92nd floor to the 87th floor, and it weighs 728 tons. And what it does, this was during a typhoon last year, what it does is it basically pulls as the building starts to sway in one direction, this tuned mass damper's there and it's kind of exerting a force to kind of pull it back in the line. Super cool. And so it's good to note that when the winds pick up, it's really nice to have someone at the top that's pulling for you. And again, the last skyscraper that I wanna talk to you about today is the Borsch Khalifa. Now everything that we've talked about so far has been refined and improved and applied to make this building possible. But that's not really what I wanna talk about with the Borsch Khalifa. After the attack of September 11th, 2001 on the Twin Towers, some people said that no super tall building would ever be constructed again because the problem becomes one of evacuation. In an evacuation situation, stairs are really the only option and walking down stairs as it turns out is actually almost as difficult as walking up them in case you weren't aware. And at twice the height of the former One World Trade Center, the Borsch Khalifa needed a place to ensure the safety of those inside. I mean, it has a naturally fire-resistant concrete core which is great, it helps. But even so, as you build higher and higher, more and more people are gonna need to walk ever further to get to safety. Again, this thing's half a mile tall. You're not walking half a mile in a fire downstairs and making it out alive. So how do the people of the Borsch Khalifa get out in an emergency? The answer is they don't. It isn't enough to just give one option to people who are in danger to leave the building. And in fact, with the Borsch Khalifa, there are refuge rooms on all the mechanical floors. And they're built from layers of reinforced concrete and fireproof sheeting. And they can actually, the walls can withstand the heat of a fire for up to two hours. Every room has a dedicated supply of air that's pumped through fire-resistant pipes. And by creating these safe places that people in danger can go, the architects are making it more likely that people will survive a catastrophe. And they put these safe places every 25 floors or so. Because it doesn't really matter, it doesn't really matter if the safe places exist if they're too inaccessible or they're too risky to get to. And in a fire, you may already know, it's not usually the fire that kills someone but smoke inhalation. And one of the interesting things is that here's one of these refuge rooms, as they're called. If the route to the refuge room is blocked by smoke, this room's not gonna be any good. You can't get down the stairwell, it's not gonna help you. So if fire activates a fire detector or a heat sensor or a water sprinkler goes off, a network of high-powered fans actually kick in and they force clean cool air from the outside through these fire-resistant ducts that are in the building to push the toxic smoke out of the stairwell and keep the route clear. It's really important not just to provide fresh air but to actively work to push out the toxic elements that are in your building. And of course, none of this is really a substitute for rescue workers coming to the aid of those people in refuge rooms. This safe place is just a place for people to go while people who are in the building are actively working to fight the fire. Because anything worth building is only worth building because of how it impacts people. This has not been a talk about skyscrapers. Thank you very much. Was this sign kind of metaphor is the question? I don't know. What do you think? No, no, so the question Mike had was a troll, so I'm not gonna repeat it. What is the meaning of the stickers? Well, this one's a lobster and this one's an owl and this one's a humane development sticker, which is another thing that I believe in. That's the meaning. This meaning here is to be a lobster and this meaning here is to be an owl. I work for a company called CareZone, by the way, and that owl, that awesome owl sticker is their logo. I'm really thankful to them for letting me be here today and I'm really thankful to Mike for inviting me and thanks so much, I'm really sad. This is the last Mountain West, but thanks so much, Mike, for everything you're doing.