The structural failure on 42nd St. in Midtown Manhattan this past week made headlines all over the world. The building in question was originally an office building belonging to Pfizer and is now in the process of being converted into a residential apartment building. It is the largest office to residential conversion project in US history and will result in nearly 1600 apartments.

The structural design of a building is based on several factors. The first is, of course, the weight of all of the levels of the building that are being supported above the current level. The second is the lateral forces that result from the wind, pushing the building sideways.

These are usually handled with sheer walls or diagonal bracing members that prevent the building from deflecting sideways.

This is where most structural engineers get it wrong. The assumption is that if the wind is blowing from one side of the building, you have a zone of high-pressure on that side in a zone of low pressure on the opposite side. intuitively this makes sense. Wind tends to flow in a straight line. But in a dense urban environment with lots of surrounding buildings, the wind can and often does go in circles as it makes its way around the neighbouring buildings. In fact, there are many examples of structural failures in New York City, where the wind can often cause a building to twist like a corkscrew rather than just trying to bend to the wind. When that happens, the structural columns in the corners are the ones that experience the most stress. They’re almost always the ones that fail first.

I’m going to bet that wind was a contributing factor. Now if you look at the weather on the day of the failure, the wind was light ranging from 5-7 mph out of the north west. Hardly the conditions that would damage a building.

The heat an humidity on July 3 triggered powerful afternoon and evening thunderstorms across the city, bringing damaging wind gusts that caused localized power outages for over 17,000 New Yorkers before conditions calmed back down. I suspect that the damage happened on July 3 and was not noticed until Tuesday when the columns progressively moved and buckled.

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