Wednesday, March 24, 2004

Tall Buildings

Did anyone watch “In conversation with Young Ming” recently? The topic was on tallest buildings in Asia. It seems that the new world’s tallest buildings are located in Asia. One main building of discussion was the Taipei 101 in Taiwan. They discussed the need to build such a tall building in earthquake and typhoon-prone Taiwan.

I personally think it’s a severe waste of resources to build such a building in such surroundings. The cost would be much higher as compared to a similar building in more stable surroundings. The foundation would have to be much stronger and deeper to sustain such a tall building. I forgot the exact height but it’s above 500 metres.

Architecturally, the building would require external as well as internal framing to transfer not only dead and live loads but wind load as well. Hence, the need for external framing is extremely important if not the occupants at the upper half of the building will experience movement and visually experience it in worse cases.

Cities after cities in Asia are all literally “reaching for the sky” in their new buildings. Look at the Petronas Tower in Kuala Lumpar, Jin Mao Tower in Shanghai, Finance Building in Hong Kong, etc, just to name a few. Look at the list of the tallest 200 building in the world here.

One funny point the guests noted in the show: The buildings are just there to show off. As they put it, it’s a case of “ai zi le” which is something about “face”. Things like Taipei 101 to challenge the tallest building in Shanghai, China, Petronas Towers “built for the eyes of Singapore”. It’s quite funny.

If Reader scrolled down, you would have probably noticed Singapore IS in the top 200 list of tallest building. Another fact to note, Singapore’s tallest building are identical in height, all 3 of them stopping at 280 metres. This point was noted in the show whereby the guest speaker felt that Singapore’s decision not to compete for the tallest building was, in his opinion, wise. He felt that Singapore had all the finance means, geographical surrounding to create such a building. But why the decision? The rest is my opinion. The taller a building goes, the more problem there are. Singapore’s strict building and fire regulations are quite legendary. This is one main reason why we see headlines in the news like: Fire kills 50 in hotel in other country. This had almost never happened in Singapore.

Why? The people at the Fire Safety Bureau (FSB) make sure the chances of this happening are kept to a minimum. Just ask anyone in the architectural field and they will tell you that FSB have thousands of regulations that must be met. Imagine a fire breaks out on the 100th floor, you would have to run all the way down to the first floor. The 911 incident was extremely unfortunate (that’s an understatement). The main core was damaged by the impact, allowing fire to start burning in what was actually the fire-proof core, thus trapping people in the higher floors. The structure of the World Trade Centre (WTC) was such that it had a concrete centre service core with steel beams extending out to form the office floors (a service core normally have escape staircases, passenger lifts, building services etc).

Personally, I think buildings shouldn’t go too high. If we were to continue building at this rate, we are all going to have buildings that are 1 kilometre high! If that were to happen, the street level would be in constant darkness throughout the day. Can anyone remember the show “5th Element”? The designers sort of conceptualise the future with such buildings. Mile high buildings with multi-level highways. The human race is just going to self-destruct one fine day. Sigh.
fjozn at 8:21 PM