i hate when art depicts a derelict cityscape in like the post-apocalypse or something and the office buildings and apartments just kinda fell over or sunk into the ground but. didn't break at all? as if it's just a cube of solid fucking titanium and not a mostly-air-filled concrete box.
i don't think there's a great working model that scales to real buildings. popsicle sticks? get real. so tell me what you think of this engineering analog: build a candy tower out of graham crackers and licorice. the crackers are concrete, the licorice is steel. even IF the tower got pushed over by a kaiju, like a human pushing over a candy tower, it would crack and bend apart into pieces and rubble. building failures would be more complex than this though, especially with a foundation into the ground, so imagine the building folding, buckling, collapsing... instead of toppling like a book without a bookend
the optimal strength tower would be a stack of solid graham crackers and a shell of solid licorice. but that wouldn't have any floors in it huh. and the forthcoming use of this model in high school physics classes assuming massive virality of my blog would obviously allot students a limited amount of graham crackers and licorice while grading on combined height and sturdiness. duh.
bringing my architecture ass into this
so the current standard is more like a bunch of vertical and horizontal graham crackers, with a single horizontal layer of licorice under it and several braids of licorice standing vertically under the lines of vertical graham crackers. There's also sometimes vertical and horizontal licorice mixed into the graham cracker pattern, but that's for the really big ones usually
(the shell of modern office buildings would be comparable to tissue paper in this analogy, so we'll ignore it. it provides no structural support in most modern cases)
so you just have this hollow cube with graham crackers resisting every force (above, sideways, shear aka other sideways, diagonal from adjacent, etc) plus the fact that these graham crackers are also expected to carry up to a certain amount of goldfish crackers on them. a total cracker weight if you will
time itself can eventually wear through the graham crackers enough to cause partial or full collapse (depending on where it is). this would typically result in all the levels above it coming down. if all of that graham cracker weighs more than the max cracker weight allowed, then it'll collapse everything under it too
so the visual would be as if a kaiju hand smashed a weak cardboard box. which ironically would be the same result if the deterioration was an immediate result of a kaiju hand
back to the optimization of sturdiness, there isn't many methods known that are better, aside from replacing all the graham with specialty-crafted licorice that can bend, move, and overall breathe the way the concrete graham crackers can
