How about they design a building right. If the 4 story condos I lived in previously were designed to be facing North and South so the sun didnt heat them up as much during the day. I would think a massive 37 floor building project in London would have taken into account the position of the sun as well.
The test, of course, will be whether they will be using the coming 12 months to figure out a solution and applying it so this won't happen again next time there's sun in September. I think they will, since torching things is generally not a good idea, and also liability hell.
> How about they design a building right.
Oh please. If you've never build anything that turned out to malfunction in an unexpected way, you've never build anything.
It's not about taking the position of the sun into account, it's foreseeing that the curvature of the facade would concentrate the sun in an unfortunate way.
Any kid with a magnifying class can tell you what curved class can do with light. My point was that if building projects take in account which way the sun will move in the sky, then they should take into account what the sun might do when it hits the building.
> Oh please. If you've never build anything that turned out to malfunction in an unexpected way, you've never build anything.
You are very right and I dont see how they might have foreseen this. It is quite unusual for the windows on a building to start melting cars, especially in a mild climate like London. The fact remains that if it can mess a Jaguar up what happens when the sun rays are concentrated into a flat across the street that may have a small child or elderly person who may not be to leave the room when it starts getting hot.
as it was already mentioned this architect had already built death ray building in Las Vegas
>It is quite unusual for the windows on a building to start melting cars, especially in a mild climate like London.
Sun's potential energy flux on the Earth's surface, be it Las Vegas or London, is 1KWt per m2 of the surface _perpendicular_ to the flux. So given clear day and good angle (close to perpendicular) of a building to the Sun's light, the building will be beaming back significant part of that 1KWt/m2.
Instead of mild I should've said rainy or cloudy place like London.
For London in Autumn/Winter will have a surface normal of z~=60-70 degrees to the Sun. Much greater than 48.2 degrees, so the peak insolation must necessarily be less than 1kWm-2.
Had they used a hyperbolic shape or essentially any other curve, this problem wouldn't happen and the building would still look the same to the casual observer.
The same effect is possible to obtain with a hyperbola. A "small" section of a hyperbola is very similar to a small section of a circle that is very similar to a small section of a parabola. With any similar curve you get a "focus" point. Some are better to concentrate the rays in a small area and produce more heating there.
They should have calculated where this point is and be sure that wherever the sun is, the point is allways bellow the earth surface, so they get a big lighted area in the floor. (Another possibility is to put the "focus" in the middle of the air and hope that no one notice the roasted birds.)
You know the old joke about the engineer and the hot-air balloon?
http://www.poeticexpressions.co.uk/poems/Engineer%20v%20Mana...