Why Buildings Fall Down

How Structures Fail

By: Matthys Levy, Mario Salvadori, Kevin Woest (Illustrator)

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Paperback | 8 January 2010 | Edition Number 1

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352 Pages

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23 x 15 x 2.5

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The authors examine buildings of all kinds, from ancient domes like Istanbul's Hagia Sophia to the state-of-the-art Hartford Civic Arena. Their subjects range from the man-caused destruction of the Parthenon to the earthquake damage of 1989 in Armenia and San Francisco. The stories that make up Why Buildings Fall Down are in the end very human ones, tales of the interaction of people and nature, of architects, engineers, builders, materials, and natural forces all coming together in sometimes dramatic (and always instructive) ways.

Industry Reviews

In Why Buildings Stand Up, Salvadori wrote so knowledgeably, expressing his sheer delight, about bridges, loads, stress, weather and a host of other topics, that the general reader was totally captivated by what he might have expected to be a fairly dusty subject. This successor volume is, as may be imagined, less aesthetically satisfying but a whole lot jazzier. It chronicles and explains spectacular architectural failures - some of them horrible disasters: bridges, tower blocks, dams, some new and some ancient. The ghastly collapse of the Hyatt Regency hotel in Kansas City in 1981 is one case to be examined in detail along with the causes of this bureaucratic and engineering failure, and the author finds room as well for disasters of a different kind in such places as Dresden and Coventry. The 11 September terrorist attack in New York is also given detailed structural treatment. These books are enthralling. There's no question of having one of them: you need them both, and the way you look at buildings will never be the same again. (Kirkus UK)

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Non-Fiction Engineering & Technology Civil Engineering Structural Engineering Arts & Entertainment Architecture Architectural Structure & Design Building Construction & Materials Theory of Architecture Text Books Higher Education & Vocational Textbooks Engineering & Physics Higher Education Textbooks

Perface	p. 9
Acknowledgments	p. 11
Introduction	p. 13
The First Structural Failure	p. 17
Miracle on Thirty-fourth Street	p. 25
Will the Pantheon Stand Up Forever?	p. 31
For Lack of Redundancy	p. 55
Big Bangs	p. 76
The Day the Earth Shook	p. 90
Galloping Gertie	p. 109
When Metals Tire	p. 121
Thruways to Eternity	p. 134
The Weaknesses of Mother Earth	p. 149
Valley of Tears	p. 161
The House of Cards	p. 173
Structural Dermatology	p. 183
Old-Age Death	p. 207
The Worst Structural Disaster in the United States	p. 221
The Politics of Destruction	p. 231
The Structure of the Law	p. 242
Terror from the Sky	p. 257
Conclusion: Can We Prevent Future Failures?	p. 269
Appendices
Loads	p. 281
Stress and Strain	p. 289
Structural Materials	p. 292
Structural Systems	p. 295
Index	p. 327
Table of Contents provided by Syndetics. All Rights Reserved.

Why Buildings Fall Down

How Structures Fail

At a Glance

Paperback

Industry Reviews

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How to return your order

Defective items

You Can Find This Book In

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