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June 30, 2005
Freedom Tower
The most puzzling thing for me about he 'Freedom Tower', aside from the fact that it's a memorial and so I'm not quite sure why we need the word 'Freedom' in the name, (sounds rather Orwellian to me 'We'll always be free while we have the Freedom Tower!') is that it's supposed to be more stable. Why?
Let's amble through the hallowed halls of skyscraper history. It seems to me this is an exercise in futility. By any reasonable standard skyscrapers are incredibly well constructed, safe buildings. Take any non-skyscraper building, detonate a 1300 pound bomb in the basement and if it survives then that may be all we can ask. To be safe, we could up the size of the bomb to 5000 lbs. But it is simply beyond reason to think that a September 11th style attack will lead to anything other than building collapse. We should beef up a plan to evacuate in the event of such and attack, do things like have a way to rescue the people above the blast floor but the over structural integrity of skyscrapers is already beyond compare. Does anyone really want to look at a building like this, ever? Making the freedom tower the 'safest skyscraper in the world' doesn't have to mean making it ugly.
Posted by conryf at 11:35 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack