#structural engineering

Bamboo has been used as a building material for millennia in South America, Africa and Asia, and grows in abundance in many countries in these regions. But only recently has its seismic resilience started to be more widely recognised through a growing body of research and laboratory shock tests, which indicate that its remarkable natural properties could make it ideal for withstanding earthquakes. Today, construction projects across the world, from the Philippines to Pakistan to Ecuador, are seeking to utilise the natural material that engineers and architects compare favourably to steel.

Bamboo forests are incredibly fast growing and act as carbon sinks, absorbing more carbon than they release, so building with bamboo rather than materials like concrete and steel can drastically reduce a structure's embodied carbon. It is also cheap and locally available in many countries.

A team of researchers at University of British Columbia have developed a new design for highrises that could help tall buildings withstand major earthquakes, while keeping people safe inside. Led by structural engineering professor Tony Yang at UBC's faculty of applied science, the project aims to prepare cities like Vancouver for the "big one." "We are expected to have very large earthquakes," Yang said. 

I'm continuing my study of Brilliant Minds architecture (which I began here) with another building featured multiple times in Season 1 - Ericka Kinney's apartment building, and its partial collapse in 1x12.

Ericka's apartment building at the beginning of 1x12

Like many buildings depicted on Brilliant Minds, there are two distinct filming locations used for Ericka's apartment building--one in SoHo, Manhattan, and one in downtown Toronto, close to the studio where the majority of Brilliant Minds is filmed.

210 Spring Street - Sullivanesque NYC Apartment

210 Spring Street, the SoHo location for Ericka's apartment building.

From what I can glean from the episodes, Ericka lived in a 10+ story masonry apartment building in the Bronx, probably based on pre-World War II architecture in NYC. The filming location for the exterior of Ericka's building in 1x05 was 210 Spring Street in Manhattan. This is a 6-story wood-and-masonry structure, completed in 1900. The ground floor is retail space while the upper floors contain apartments. The brick, stone, and terracotta detailing on the front places the building in the Sullivanesque/Chicago School style, popularized in cities in the early 20th century by architect Louis Sullivan. Sullivan is perhaps best known as the father of the skyscraper, or for his quote about building design “form must ever follow function.”

The Wainwright building in St. Louis, MO--possibly my favorite Louis Sullivan building. Note the intricate detailing beneath each window and around the cornice at the top of the building.

Apartment buildings from this era represent a transition from the "old" building techologies of masonry and wood to the "new" techologies of iron and steel. 210 Spring street was originally constructed with exterior load-bearing walls of brick and interior load-bearing columns and beams made of heavy timber. This would have resulted in apartment layouts with lots of small individual rooms divided by full-height walls, to accommodate the limited span distance of the timber floor joists. Over time, various unit owners who wanted to convert their apartments to an "open concept" added steel beams and columns to help support longer spans of open space.

Interior of one of the units at 210 Spring Street

30-34 Duncan Street - Pre-War Modernism in Toronto

For Brilliant Minds 1x12, the exterior shots of Ericka's apartment building were filmed in downtown Toronto--specifically, at 30-34 Duncan Street.

30-34 Duncan Street, the exterior of Ericka's building in 1x12

30-34 Duncan Street is an 8-story office building in Toronto built in 1945. While the exterior masonry is a similar color to that of 210 Spring street, this building utilized much more advanced structural technology. Rather than using masonry to support the building, 30-34 Duncan Street hangs its decorative brick facade off a structural steel skeleton. This enables the building to at least double its window-to-wall ratio relative to 210 Spring Street--no more pesky brick piers to hold the building up!

The result is a lighter, more open feeling building with large windows and wide open floor plates--perfect for office spaces, and vastly different than the closed-in rooms of the 1900s Sullivanesque buildings. 30-34 Duncan Street also shows the influence of European Functionalist Modernism. Note the lack of ornamentation on the exterior and the uniformity on all sides of the building. The goal of this structure was functionality, not aesthetics.

Collapse - Structural Failure, Human Error

Partial collapse at 1915 Billingsley Terrace, the inspiration for BM 1x12

The events of Brilliant Minds 1x12 were, in fact, almost certainly inspired by real events.

On December 11th 2023, a partial building collapse occurred at 1915 Billingsly Terrace in the Bronx, a 6-story steel, wood, and masonry apartment building originally designed in 1926. Amazingly, no one was hurt in this collapse, although the entire building was evacuated as a precaution until the stability of the remainder of the structure could be verified.

A New York City Department of Buildings (DOB) report later determined that the collapse was caused by the partial demolition of a load-bearing masonry pier (a type of column) at the building's northeast corner. At the time of the collapse, 1915 Billingsly Terrace was undergoing city-mandated renovations to repair unsafe facade conditions, including cracked brick, bowing brick, and loose and damaged mortar. The removal of crucial bricks from this pier caused the corner of the building it supported to collapse.

First responders search the rubble at 1915 Billingsly Terrace to confirm no residents were trapped in the collapse.

The building had been inspected multiple times by NYC Department of Buildings (DOB) and found to be "unsafe" per city standards. There were also many open complaints filed about the building through the City DOB portal. Residents complained frequently of the sole elevator being broken, of dangerous and unsafe gas line repairs, and of the building moving and creaking around them. "You can hear it cracking and deteriorating from the inside," one complaint read.

For the city-mandated repairs, the owner hired a structural engineer to survey the building, then create a set of construction documents to fix the deficiencies. During design, the project structural engineer misidentified the northeast corner load-bearing pier as a non-load bearing cavity wall system. Since he mistakenly assumed the pier wasn't load-bearing, he didn't bother to order the building to be properly shored and supported before the bricks in the pier were removed. If he'd actually bothered to obtain the original blueprints for the building, he would have realized his mistake.

Original blueprint of 1915 Billingsly Terrace, with the northeast load bearing pier indicated with the red arrow. Taken from the NYC DOB report on the collapse.

This was the condition of the pier at basement level before demolition started, which should have also raised red flags for the project team. The vertical cracking indicates that the pier was already over-loaded and close to failure. Dear reader: if you ever see a masonry column that looks like this in a basement, get out quickly and call your local building department.

Damaged pier at 1915 Billingsly Terrace, taken from the NYC DOB report on the collapse

Each brick in the pier carried approximately 8,000 pounds of load. When demolition began, it only took a few bricks being chipped away to create trouble. Below is an image taken from a site security camera, exactly at the moment when the pier started to move and crumble. Note the piece of brick in the hand of the worker on the right. Complete collapse occurred three minutes later.

In the aftermath of the collapse, the structural engineer of record had his license revoked and was banned from inspecting buildings in New York City for at least two years. There were no injuries in this particular case of human error, but it could have been so much worse. A point that the Brilliant Minds writers drive home in 1x12 with the collapse of Ericka's building.

If you're interested in reading the full NYC DOB report on the collapse, here is the link:

In 1971 German architect/engineer Frei Otto (1925-2015) was honored with an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, directed by Ludwig Glaeser and followed by the present eponymous catalogue, published by MoMA in 1972. The exhibition took a place at a time when Otto had already established his Institut für leichte Flächentragwerke at Stuttgart University, designed the German pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal but arguably his most prominent work, the Olympic Stadium and adjacent facilities of the 1972 Olympics in Munich wasn’t yet completed. Still, the catalogue includes Frei Otto’s models of the latter project just as well as numerous other models and completed works from the 1950s and 1960s.

William Le Baron Jenney – Scientist of the Day

William Le Baron Jenney, an American structural engineer and architect, was born Sep. 25, 1832.