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Comment by 2143 | Hacker News Reader

Walls that slant — isn't that horrible from an engineering perspective?

If it's just a normal vertical wall it's naturally "balanced", but slanting walls would have a tendency to, I don't know, fall down? How does it support the next floor on top?!

Likewise with Frank Gehry's designs. Look at MIT buildings. People might probably consider it works of art, but I — a nobody — consider it cringeworthy.

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Slanted walls per se are a bad idea, but arches are self supporting - instead of a vertical load on the slanted wall you get a compressive one along the centerline of the "wall".

The auditorium is not in the building but 'half way' underground [0], so these walls supports the cupola and themselves, but they are not 'load-bearing'. Also did you ever seen how igloo is made?

https://images.adsttc.com/media/images/5ad6/3db5/f197/cc73/2...

It’s my understanding that the frame supports the floors, not the walls.

Oh okay. I thought load-bearing walls[1] were a thing.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load-bearing_wall

They are definitely a thing, but not all walls need to be load bearing. This is the sort of thing they work out during one of the early stages when they make sure the architect has actually designed something that can be physically built, plenty of (most?) architects even do this themselves as part of initial design work and it’s not something you see as much in the modern era of with computers to help make “sanity check” calculations like this part of the design process, like a pre-commit hook linking your code they can check that they haven’t got major structural elements like load bearing columns or cantilevered spans that can’t be built with concrete and steel. It won’t necessarily ensure the design passes local building codes, but it will definitely help avoid embarrassment for an architect of having to redesign something because it literally could not be built as designed by them.

Not in the school of architecture to which Niemeyer belongs. The internal concrete structure and non-load-bearing walls was key to Le Corbusier's tower blocks. You can see this by the fact that the walls often don't extend to the ground, where the building is supported on open pillars, as in the building in TFA. Modern skyscrapers are just a development of the same principle.

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