Skyscrapers Essay

Can the skyscrapers keep withstanding the wind pressure?

What are skyscrapers?

A skyscraper is a tall, building having multiple floors. When the term was actually used in the 1880s it described a building of 10 to 20 floors but now today it describes one of at least 40–50 floors. Mostly designed for office, commercial and residential uses, moreover a skyscraper can also be called a high-rise, but the term "skyscraper" is used for buildings higher than 100 m.

Research of recent time

Think in your mind the skyline of downtown Toronto. There's the CN Tower, and then 72-floor First Canadian Place, the city's tallest skyscraper, Cascading from there are the assorted banks and hotels and insurance towers. Now, use your imagination to build some new buildings, these ones reaching two, three, and four times higher than the others. Top it all with a skyscraper which is one mile high (three times as high as the CN Tower).

Sound fanciful? yes it did 30 years ago when Frank Lloyd Wright 2 proposed the first mile-high building. But not today. The World is now entering the age of super skyscraper. Skyscrapers approaching the mile mark may still be awhile off, but there are proposals

Since the 10-story steel-frame Home Insurance Building, the world’s first skyscraper, which was opened in Chicago in 1885, architects have had to think about wind pressure, or “wind loading,” as they’ve built higher and higher. Today, wind engineering is an integral aspect in the design of any high rise building. As Garber explains, a building is like “a giant sail” with a great deal of area that the wind can push against. “The wind is blowing on the building causing it to sway and twist,” he says. “For certain shapes, the wind can form a wake similar to what you’d see behind a boat with vortices shedding off, alternating on both side and pushing the building from side to