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In 1945 a speeding bomber aircraft accidently crashed into the most iconic building of the United States - The Empire State Building. You might be expecting something like this. Huge fire, impact, Force damage.
The engines destroying the lift system and portion of the building. Despite all these, the Empire State Building stood strong. All these heavy pieces were moved by now primitive looking basic derricks.
Their 13 months of hard work long ago resulted in this beautiful steel structure. The backbone of this building is the steel columns, a total of 210 steel columns were erected for this building. 12 of those columns are uninterrupted reaching the very top of the building. Let’s take a closer look at the progression of the columns. A structure called a girder connects the columns and provides immense strength on this structure floor beams are connected.
Now it’s time to go up. Huge derricks were used to lift the pre-fabricated columns to the current floor. However, this is not an easy task. Material lifting maximum up to a height of 30 story building was possible by the derricks of those days.
This means if you wanted to lift the material from the ground floor to the 70th floor there should be two intermediate derricks in between. This was such a beautiful operation that the bypassers used to watch it with awe. While the columns were lifted horizontally, it was a challenge to then align them vertically before fixing them in place. This was achieved with the help of an interesting string trick just remove one string and shift the other string to the other end.
If you lift the column now, it will stand vertically. The columns were then immediately riveted or bolted with the previous columns. A group of sky boys worked in perfect coordination to accomplish this riveting operation.
It’s fun to know that even the catcher guy plays an important role here. Millions of rivets were used for this mega project but nobody knows the exact number. Once all the columns were fitted, they started placing girds between them. You can see that as we go up some columns abruptly stop in between as a result size of the building floor shrank after reaching this height. You can see that the Empire State building has five major floor area reductions. The building looks quite striking after it’s covered with the Limestone and glass. Does this design resemble something? It’s inspired from the shape of an ordinary pencil. The architects behind this building wanted to achieve the tag of tallest building of the world for the Empire State Building, an easy way to achieve this is by making the building like this. Even though officially this design is the tallest, no spectator would truly call it a tall building, instead they would say that it’s wide.
To give the appearance of height they opted for a pencil design you can see that from the 29th to the 71st floor there is no change in the width of the building. The topmost office space is on the 85th floor.
Floors 86 to 102 are Art Deco floors.
The highest Observatory is situated on the 102nd floor. Another interesting fact about the Empire State Building is that its design was modified 15 times during its construction. Initially, they plan to construct 50 stories, but eventually ended up constructing 102 floors. The reason for this drastic design change was competition with the nearby Chrysler Building. The competition between these two towers for the title of the world’s tallest tower was so fierce that the design of the Chrysler Building was also modified many times.
The Chrysler Building was completed first and held the record for the tallest tower in the world for 11 short months until the Empire State Building was inaugurated. Although Chrysler lost the coveted title of the tallest building, one must admit that it wins in terms of beauty, especially at night. The Empire State Building held the title of the tallest tower for 40 years until 1971 when the World Trade Center overtook the record by a whopping 83 meters. Now straight into the construction achievements of the Empire State Building, for example can you believe the floor of such a massive building is made up of simple terracotta? The beauty of the terracotta floor is that it consists of plain individual block that lock perfectly between two floor beams.
The engines destroying the lift system and portion of the building. Despite all these, the Empire State Building stood strong. All these heavy pieces were moved by now primitive looking basic derricks.
Their 13 months of hard work long ago resulted in this beautiful steel structure. The backbone of this building is the steel columns, a total of 210 steel columns were erected for this building. 12 of those columns are uninterrupted reaching the very top of the building. Let’s take a closer look at the progression of the columns. A structure called a girder connects the columns and provides immense strength on this structure floor beams are connected.
Now it’s time to go up. Huge derricks were used to lift the pre-fabricated columns to the current floor. However, this is not an easy task. Material lifting maximum up to a height of 30 story building was possible by the derricks of those days.
This means if you wanted to lift the material from the ground floor to the 70th floor there should be two intermediate derricks in between. This was such a beautiful operation that the bypassers used to watch it with awe. While the columns were lifted horizontally, it was a challenge to then align them vertically before fixing them in place. This was achieved with the help of an interesting string trick just remove one string and shift the other string to the other end.
If you lift the column now, it will stand vertically. The columns were then immediately riveted or bolted with the previous columns. A group of sky boys worked in perfect coordination to accomplish this riveting operation.
It’s fun to know that even the catcher guy plays an important role here. Millions of rivets were used for this mega project but nobody knows the exact number. Once all the columns were fitted, they started placing girds between them. You can see that as we go up some columns abruptly stop in between as a result size of the building floor shrank after reaching this height. You can see that the Empire State building has five major floor area reductions. The building looks quite striking after it’s covered with the Limestone and glass. Does this design resemble something? It’s inspired from the shape of an ordinary pencil. The architects behind this building wanted to achieve the tag of tallest building of the world for the Empire State Building, an easy way to achieve this is by making the building like this. Even though officially this design is the tallest, no spectator would truly call it a tall building, instead they would say that it’s wide.
To give the appearance of height they opted for a pencil design you can see that from the 29th to the 71st floor there is no change in the width of the building. The topmost office space is on the 85th floor.
Floors 86 to 102 are Art Deco floors.
The highest Observatory is situated on the 102nd floor. Another interesting fact about the Empire State Building is that its design was modified 15 times during its construction. Initially, they plan to construct 50 stories, but eventually ended up constructing 102 floors. The reason for this drastic design change was competition with the nearby Chrysler Building. The competition between these two towers for the title of the world’s tallest tower was so fierce that the design of the Chrysler Building was also modified many times.
The Chrysler Building was completed first and held the record for the tallest tower in the world for 11 short months until the Empire State Building was inaugurated. Although Chrysler lost the coveted title of the tallest building, one must admit that it wins in terms of beauty, especially at night. The Empire State Building held the title of the tallest tower for 40 years until 1971 when the World Trade Center overtook the record by a whopping 83 meters. Now straight into the construction achievements of the Empire State Building, for example can you believe the floor of such a massive building is made up of simple terracotta? The beauty of the terracotta floor is that it consists of plain individual block that lock perfectly between two floor beams.
The details of their connection is illustrated. Even if somebody stands on it, this geometrical lock will prevent any failure. A concrete layer was added to reinforce the terracotta. Here’s an interesting challenge for you. Let’s construct the exterior walls of the Empire State Building. Here we’re using the girder as the support for this brick wall after completing the construction. Let’s quickly zoom out and see what it looks like. What an ugly building you’ve constructed. The columns are visible, giving it an unpolished look.
So what’s the solution here? Introduce a new support structure called a spandrel beam. If you arrange the bricks on the newly installed spandrel beam, it will hide all the columns. Now it’s time to attached the skin of the building, the facade work. Nearly half of the wall remains uncovered by brick. Aluminum framed glass windows will occupy this empty space, next we can lay down some stunning Indiana limestones. They were hooked using a concrete brick. The alternating pattern of limestone and glass gives the building its characteristic curtain wall design.
After witnessing the sheer scope of the effort involved on the building’s construction, you may be wondering how they were even able to accomplish such an enormous task in just 13 months. Just to produce this video about the Empire State Building took 3 months. The company behind the construction of the Empire State Building managed only the planning part of the construction directly. They completely contracted the execution part of the construction.
The next comes the art of perfect prefabricated structures. The position of the holes, their size and dimensions of the structures had to be perfectly planned and cut at the factory. A total of 500 trucks brought materials to the site every day. If a truck was delayed, it has to deliver the material the next day. Now, the American idea to transport the material within a floor - use railroad tracks. The major reason for the super fast completion of this project was the parallel execution of different construction activities.
You’ll be amazed to know that the excavation for the Empire State began even before demolition of the previous building was complete. They began facade work on the lower floors without completing the column erection of the upper floors. The office interior and floor work also went parallel with this activities. To complete this project on time a whopping number of 34000 workers were employed.
That is perfect engineering planning and such a massive building got done in just 13 months.
Something unheard of even during modern times.
A tricky issue to overcome was figuring out how to reach the top floor via elevator with the least number of stops. The way a person reaches the topmost floor of this building starting from the ground floor is illustrated in the left side of this video. This was achieved by dividing the elevator system into seven parts.
Each part covered only a portion of the building height. In fact the elevators take up a large chunk of floor space in the Empire State building. Sadly the offices are left with a reduced area. This building features a total of 73 elevators.
Now let's take a look at the foundation of the world's most photographed building. The total weight of the building is estimated to be approximately 365,000 tons. Thus, the concrete foundation was laid at a depth of 17 meters. Thanks to the strong underground stone of New York this foundation was able to bear such a huge weight. This is the reason there are so many skyscrapers in this area.
The 1945 bomber aircraft accident is a perfect example of Empire State Building strength. The impact of the accident was huge, however the authorities were able to re open the building after just one week of repair work.
So what’s the solution here? Introduce a new support structure called a spandrel beam. If you arrange the bricks on the newly installed spandrel beam, it will hide all the columns. Now it’s time to attached the skin of the building, the facade work. Nearly half of the wall remains uncovered by brick. Aluminum framed glass windows will occupy this empty space, next we can lay down some stunning Indiana limestones. They were hooked using a concrete brick. The alternating pattern of limestone and glass gives the building its characteristic curtain wall design.
After witnessing the sheer scope of the effort involved on the building’s construction, you may be wondering how they were even able to accomplish such an enormous task in just 13 months. Just to produce this video about the Empire State Building took 3 months. The company behind the construction of the Empire State Building managed only the planning part of the construction directly. They completely contracted the execution part of the construction.
The next comes the art of perfect prefabricated structures. The position of the holes, their size and dimensions of the structures had to be perfectly planned and cut at the factory. A total of 500 trucks brought materials to the site every day. If a truck was delayed, it has to deliver the material the next day. Now, the American idea to transport the material within a floor - use railroad tracks. The major reason for the super fast completion of this project was the parallel execution of different construction activities.
You’ll be amazed to know that the excavation for the Empire State began even before demolition of the previous building was complete. They began facade work on the lower floors without completing the column erection of the upper floors. The office interior and floor work also went parallel with this activities. To complete this project on time a whopping number of 34000 workers were employed.
That is perfect engineering planning and such a massive building got done in just 13 months.
Something unheard of even during modern times.
A tricky issue to overcome was figuring out how to reach the top floor via elevator with the least number of stops. The way a person reaches the topmost floor of this building starting from the ground floor is illustrated in the left side of this video. This was achieved by dividing the elevator system into seven parts.
Each part covered only a portion of the building height. In fact the elevators take up a large chunk of floor space in the Empire State building. Sadly the offices are left with a reduced area. This building features a total of 73 elevators.
Now let's take a look at the foundation of the world's most photographed building. The total weight of the building is estimated to be approximately 365,000 tons. Thus, the concrete foundation was laid at a depth of 17 meters. Thanks to the strong underground stone of New York this foundation was able to bear such a huge weight. This is the reason there are so many skyscrapers in this area.
The 1945 bomber aircraft accident is a perfect example of Empire State Building strength. The impact of the accident was huge, however the authorities were able to re open the building after just one week of repair work.