The Downside to Life in a Supertall Tower: Leaks, Creaks, Breaks

The drawings are more for the regulators such as building control than actually for the people working on site.

Talking to the constructors it is normal for architects to specify the impossible, leaving it to the constructor to actually make it up on the job.

Somebody said to me that over 30% of construction costs is waste.

It looks like there is an opportunity to implement lean methods in construction. And weirdly implement Alexander’s ideas patterns and anti patterns.

Most of MEP work is laying out pipes and wires so that the fixtures such as airvents, electric sockets and so on get connected to the system. The MEP contractor's task (overly simplifying) is to punch holes into walls and drag their spans of pipes and whatnot through them.

The designs' intent is to specify the fixtures, and how the perform (airflow etc). The subcontractor basically promises that they make those fixtures do their job - and not that their wiring and whatnot follows any specific plan necessarily.

Modern digital workflows are getting slowly integrated to the process and they may improve the productivity and quality in long term.

It's not legal.

I work in an industry that monitors such things and recommends Banks/Lenders not pay if/when these discrepancies arise (Construction Risk Management).

The appropriate party will make revisions and then prove that that change won't affect the overall project.

> Let alone technically possible?

On larger projects, Subcontractors of Subcontractors of Subcontractors can become lazy, use materials not rated for their intended use, someone doesn't double check it since they're lazy, clicks a checkbox and calls it done; out of sight out of mind.

> How does construction of these monsters work?

Preconstruction Due Diligence, Funding via Banks, Approval/Contract Signing, Mobilization to Site, Construction of Building, Final Inspections & Warranties transfered, a Certificate of Occupancy issued, and people move in.

With mega projects, you have so many moving parts that something will fall through the cracks. Some material got substituted, the pent house staircase dimensions are 2-inches off creating a variance approval, but that dimension now affects the elevator machine room, they used Cast Iron Pipe on Floors 1-10 then PVC at 11-40 and there's issues at the different pipe connections; it just cascades. This is the main reason I also work in Building Information Modeling (BIM) to mitigate such problems.

The whole point of my industry is to act as a third party between the Developer & Bank/Lender, opine on the Preconstruction Documents (Contracts, Geotech, Budget, Schedule), document the Construction each month via photos, attend Meetings, review the application for payment, and flag the bank when something changes (No Energy Star appliances suddenly? Variance? Certain brand of vinyl flooring stock low so substitute it with vinyl tile? Change Orders about to deplete the Contingency?)

It becomes such an undertaking after a certain budget size or apartment unit amount. Eventually, people get stretched thing or get lazy, they're over budget, they've gone way past their scheduled completion date and just don't care since their next project is starting up and Permits are taking way longer to get; just happens.

Hope this gives a little perspective.

I'm not the right kind of engineer to hazard a guess as to whether this is an unusually high variance for this scale of project. We also don't know what "failed to conform" means - the language is as vague as, given the ubiquity of changes at build time, intentionally pejorative. There's really not enough here to judge either the architect or the contractor; it could be a brilliant design badly implemented, or it could be a terrible design the contractor did their best to make work, and no one here or in the NYT article, including its writer, has enough information to say which.

This kind of 'normalization of deviance' is normal in normal construction, but has to be either reworked or formally normalized in critical work.

The workers would almost always try to assemble the devices as fast as possible, cutting corners here and there.

More generally, what often happens with big projects like this is the design team is not connected with the contractors that build the job. The reason why this happens is because early in the design stage when you speak to a main contractor you don’t get to talk to the actual subcontractors that will build the thing, you are essentially speaking to the salesmen that will eventually get their buying guys to hire subcontractors to do the actual work. If they are brought on early then Contractors typically find ways to use proprietary lock in and cost ratcheting techniques to increase the cost of a build once they have secured the job so to avoid this a fairly common setup for a building of this size is for a design team to prepare drawings and a performance specification to a level of detail that gets you regulatory compliance, but not a full nuts and bolts design with buildability assessed. This is not just the architectural design but also the structures, M&E, security, landscape etc. So, for example, the electrical design might be a block diagram and the loads, but the bus bars might not be sized and the suppliers for all the switchgear wont be selected. At pinch points there may be a more detailed reference design.

At this point there will be a design build contract made between the contractor and the client based on the partially complete design. This design gets handed over to the contractor to complete and the contractor’s engineers take over and complete the details. Sometimes some of the original design team gets novated from the client to the contractor, quite often only the architects but you have to be really sharp in your negotiations if you do this because once they have you hooked there will be huge time and cost pressure to complete the designs for less fees and to find ways to save money.

A rule of thumb I use is that on a A1 sheet’s worth of information takes about 1 person week to complete when you include all the research. Often with consultations with other specialists this work will be stretched over a couple of months. On a big project there will be 10s of thousands of drawings in play. This can’t be rushed if you don’t want any mistakes, but it almost always is and if you are an engineer or an architect working for the contractor at this point there is huge pressure to cut corners. Non-famous architects and engineers are actually not very well paid compared to other professionals and we tend to work very long unpaid hours with workers rights laws regularly flouted, e.g. firing pregnant women etc.

Another issue is that there is corruption in the buying department of the main contractor as well, they have gold watches and get taken on days out to go and ‘bet on horse racing’ by the subcontractors.

So the contractor’s incentive to cut costs and corruption cause a lot of last minute design changes to use a ‘preferred supplier’ or to reduce complexity or use cheaper materials. When coupled with the time pressure, things go wrong.

Everyone will say, ‘oh you architects should design everything properly down to the last detail, there should be PLM models like the aircraft industry’ but the fact is every building is a prototype, a building this large has a much higher margin of safety but it is as complicated as an airliner and airliners cost a lot more money to develop than buildings. No-one is willing to pay for the time input, they would rather let the contractor bodge it on site, often contractors will end up using the reference designs and filling the details themselves on site, e.g. using drawings never intended to be construction information.

Another one is ‘well then you should use more standardisation’ from personal experience in trying to make my own business more profitable, you can try to standardise construction details but there are a lot of high level client influenced design decisions that ripple right through a building down to the 1:2 construction details so this only works up to a point. I’ve managed to break my details down into reusable components, but I’ve not managed to literally reuse the same drawings for multiple projects.

As we’ve seen with the 737 Max debacle the airline industry is not immune from these kind of mistakes, I think ultimately the problem is probably more with project management and construction contracting culture than it is with ‘the Architects are hand wavy artists’ (we’re mostly not)

I suppose an engineer has to sign for it.

What “good” does a skyline do for society? The enormous costs to build super talls would go much further in myriad other ways, even just by making a few tall or many regular size buildings. Very far from progress if you as me.

Actually, I would take the construction of a novel building just to give views and prestige to less than one hundred families to be evidence of societal regression, since it can be used as a proxy for extreme wealth inequality.

This is just consumption for consumption's sake. You shouldn't throw away a building in ten or twenty years just beecause you get tired of it!

Humans have to get over the obsessive consumption if we are to survive the twenty first century.

Maybe it's time to embrace the future and replace these with arcologies.

> making clear that even multimillion-dollar price tags do not guarantee problem-free living

this reiterates that you can make a living simply catering to wealthy people's problems instead of dismissing them

pick and choose your battles

In Australia, I used to have an apartment in Eureka Tower:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka_Tower

The windows there were double glazed (good for heat and noise insulation), and I guess the walls were fairly thick as noise from neighbours was never a problem.

The only significant problem, and specific to that building, was the designers massively underspec-ed the cooling. So on summer days (29C -> ~44C) the air conditioning throughout the whole tower was completely useless. Sweltering hot. :(

Live in a condo and never hear anyone on my floor, and once a month maybe? Sorta hear someone above me. Windows closed I head nothing from outside

They may as well be gilded jail cells. Worse, because everyone's stuck as a renter, there's inherently no true sense of community or consideration to neighbors.

The only time I saw the two owners was when I started and when the take me out to lunch when they abruptly (but not unexpectedly) let me go.

At that meal one of the two was really excited about a new project: some turn-key restaurant idea, and how he'd only hire "hot waitresses".

Buy old and renovate has been something I’ve been told by various people.

High rises usually have spectacular shared amenities: grand pools, exercise rooms, party rooms, theaters, etc. One of mine had outdoor grilling areas that you didn't even have to clean up: the apartment had cleaning staff who would scour the grills every day.

High rises usually have 24/7 door staff to sign for & lock up packages, get taxis, handle dry cleaning, store grocery deliveries in a fridge, and let you into your unit if you get locked out. The sheer number of units makes this cost-effective for them because the costs are shared across all tenants.

High rises usually have maintenance staff during business hours and on call after hours to fix issues. Sometimes you can also hire them for handyman duties, too - I've had them install TVs, hang green screens, or paint a wall.

High rises are often the only cost-effective way to live in the core of a really vibrant city like Chicago: we couldn't have afforded a town home, let alone a single family home.

He said something like, “Well-off people suffer, of course, but those types of suffering are more difficult to measure and entail interventions beyond vaccines or food distribution. I don’t focus on those types of suffering because there so much of the basic kind and also because it’s too hard of a problem.”

When I segmented suffering by the individuals’ place on Maslow’s hierarchy, it helped me develop more compassion for the rich than is in vogue. “Oh, that guy driving that Lamborghini isn’t hungry, but he might be the loneliest person I’ve ever met.”

I don't know what the term for it would be, but it's reminding me of 'Planes, Trains, and Automobiles'. Rhyme, Rhyme, Schema Deviation.

Quite ordinary residentials are creeping on 200m.

But 300m+ building all require very special engineering. Glazing designs for <300m building will not suit a 300m+ building.

HVAC, water, and savage systems for supertall skyscrapers are still more or less a case, by case designs.

I lived in a few quite tall 200+ buildings. Leaks seem to be unavoidable with curtain walls, and the only remedy is to have glazing engineers fixing them every year.

Water supply is also finicky, and that's an inherent property of having so much apartments relying on a single pipe run.

Booming noise in ventilation is possible to avoid with extra equipment, or simply solid vent shafts at extra cost, but I experienced it even in buildings with $1m+ apartments. So, I doubt construction companies will bother ever fixing this en masse.

Sound insulation! Yes, there is no trick for it than thicker walls, and bigger gaps in between them, and it costs a lot, really a lot. You don't get it in highrises no matter the cost, unless it's being sold on this specifically.

>The meaning of the three letters in CIM Group’s name is one of real estate’s best-kept secrets. But it might as well stand for Condos In Manhattan

https://therealdeal.com/2016/12/13/manhattans-new-skyline-ci...

Aside from the fact that their private restaurant is almost certainly not closed, some billionaires being inconvenienced by what amounts to minor condo fees on their second (or third, or fourth) home is wildly different than a person with no home struggling to keep themselves warm at night. And 'wildly different' is an understatement.