If you’re at the World Trade Center and you look just a few blocks uptown, you’ll see Herzog & de Meuron’s “Jenga building” at 56 Leonard Street. One World Trade Center is a timeless design that symbolizes strength and resolve, so it’s perfect for that site. The designs were extraordinary and some people wanted some of the more exciting designs, but what they went with was more plain, or, at least, appears to be more plain. I am the official biographer of the new World Trade Center and I’ve been writing about that site - starting with the Twin Towers - since the early 1990s, so I was extremely aware of the many designs that were submitted for One World Trade Center. I love that kind of architecture, it’s very trendy.ĭupré: I have a few thoughts on the “Jenga” building in Manhattan. This is actually why the arch was created, because an arch allows you to go wider - by bowing it, it makes it structurally stronger than a typical straight span could be.ĭavids: There is a building in New York that looks a little bit like a Jenga tower because the different apartments are displaced from each other. If a wall becomes too wide and it’s not deep enough, it starts to bow and give way. It’s all about the span from one point of structure to the other point of structure. If you pull out one brick, you’re okay, but if you pull out a few of them, it starts to compromise the wall. On What Happens When You Remove a Bottom Brick If you look at the Citicorp Center in Manhattan with its tilted top, inside is a tuned mass damper, which is literally a massive weight inside the top of that building, so if the building sways a little bit to the right, the tuned mass damper slides to the other side so that it helps the building stay balanced.ĭavids: Um, balance matters a lot. With large buildings, sometimes large tanks of water are put on top of them to balance the movement from the wind.ĭupré: Balance is extremely important. If something is going to jut out at one end like a Jenga block, you have to counterbalance that. On How Much Balance Matters to Construction That’s why Jenga is so tough, because you can’t go deep in the ground, you have to build and maintain a good base of blocks instead. For a skyscraper, you have to go to rock, basically. Lopergolo: It’s all about foundation, so you have to be sure you’re going deeply in the ground when you go high. Read next: Three Surgeons Dissect the Board Game ‘Operation’ On Skyscrapers.That sense of anticipation tinged with fear is very much in step with going to the top of a skyscraper - it’s a thrill! Judith Dupré, architectural historian and author of Skyscrapers: A History of the World’s Most Extraordinary Buildings and One World Trade Center: Biography of the Building : The whole Jenga idea is that your breath is held, you’re taking chances and you’re not quite sure if the block you’re taking out is going to take down the whole thing. I had my students design a housing scheme, and I asked them to cut little pieces of wood and organize them in a similar way to the Jenga game so that they could get a sense of the whole housing organization. René Davids, professor of architecture at Berkeley University: I did use Jenga once to teach a class, or it was a similar idea anyway. I think as soon as there’s any set of blocks, architects go a little crazy. Sara Lopergolo, architect: Jenga is a really fun game and architecture nerds love it. Given this, it only makes sense to interview a few architects about that most un-pizza-like of games. In fact, the word “Jenga” derives from the Swahili word “kujenga,” which means “to build.” However, there is one thing that is most certainly like Jenga, and that is the act of constructing buildings. Now, far be it from me to disagree with a James-Beard-Award-winning chef, but not everything is like Jenga. Recently, world-renowned pizza chef Chris Bianco told me that pizza is like Jenga. Life is like Jenga, the economy is like Jenga. People love to say that stuff is like Jenga.
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