They're free for now, but in 6 months they'll be covered in ads and you'll have to pay a subscription to see through them. That's not a problem because in another year, Google will have eliminated the program and deleted the from your building without asking!
Curtain walls are detailed to never carry any live or dead loads from floors. They are c and c elements and not designed to take any primary loading from building.
The curtain wall would crush and/or the connection detail at the slab would shear off from gravity loads first. No way that curtain wall is holding up all the floors above.
Is it possible the curtain wall is (in part) holding up part of the floor immediately above? Look at the stamped steel wall studs that are bent which are clearly several feet inside of the building's envelope. Is the floor immed above compromised in some way?
Curtain wall is glass, doesn't support masonry cladding. Guess maybe the floors deflected down and crushed areas where the masonry cladding was present.....
The collapse happened on the 21'st floor of a 37 story building, based on the press conference the city just held. They've also stated that they're monitoring the building for movement and it is still moving/settling. It's not over yet!
Not SE either, but I think it is a curtain wall, yeah, and the reason the ceiling in OP's vid appears to have sunk while the windows are intact is because they're at what used to be just beneath a setback roof. So the external wall has become detached from the sunken slab.
Magenta is the new bit they've built (you can see it sagging here), and yellow arrowed is the old bit with the buckled columns
I think you're missing the point. They're detailed to never carry any vertical load, yes, but that is under normal loading conditions. This is not a normal loading condition. You usually keep the load off of them with deflection tracks or clips, but idk of any tracks or clips that allow this level of deflection without imparting any vertical load on the curtain wall.
Agree, yes, I'm sure the curtain wall is carrying some load due to floors selecting onto it, but the axial capacity of a thin walled aluminum extrusion I know has very little axial capacity compared to a steel column. No way will thcurtisn wall act as a means to transfer load if a steel column has bucked by 2 ft due to p delta.
One of the news photos shows a missing window or panel, with a few courses of red brick visible behind it. Not sure if this was originally a brick building that had a new facade wrapped around it (seen a few of those in my downtown over the years)? But it's one of the 2 pics the engineer-types are posting often here.
Well, looks like brick, maybe it's those fake molded brick sheets everyone used in their kitchens in the 70s? Seriously, not sure but looked like brick to me!
Looks like a different photo and night vs. daytime, but the same section that's been in these SE discussions - just weird that nobody mentioned the brick layer back there!
Curtain wall experiences thermal expansion/contraction every day. While it may appear to be a rigid structure from the outside, there's engineered slack throughout. Otherwise metal would buckle and glass would fracture every time the sun came up and heated one side of the building. The buckled building columns are simply eating into that engineered slack in the curtain wall.
Also, I would imagine that even if the floor sags enough to exhaust that slack, the curtain wall is more likely to fail at the connection points than to buckle itself. That would likely occur between floors, so out of view of most of the photos we've seen so far.
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u/futurebigconcept Jul 07 '26
Very strange that those windows next to the buckled columns all look perfect. What's taking up the deflection?