11 Appropriate structural order for a large apartment building
Nearly all very large buildings are built with the assumption that each floor is structurally identical, and that the upper floors mirror, exactly, lower floors. Plan variation is usually achieved by arranging lightweight non-bearing partitions within the uniform structural grid.
In most 20th-century buildings such perfect floor-to-floor repetition was a fundamental feature of the design, and without this feature most 20th-century large building designs would not work structurally. In addition, the repetition lowers the cost of contract administration. But most important is the fact that it creates a workable structural design. The columns, beams and shear walls have vertical continuity thus making a well-behaved structure.
But exact repetition does fly in the face of the fundamental principle of unfolding. It requires that each part of a structure become that which is unique and appropriate to its position in the unfolding whole.
If we look for a new kind of large building, in which there is greater freedom from such floor-by-floor constraints, we are then virtually looking for a new order-type, a new kind of structural design which will permit each part of the building to fulfill its own nature, hav its own appropriate character, without placing impossible demands on the structural design.
This building, designed to work in bending as a moment-resisting frame, with supplementary action from shear walls at the lower floors, allowed the plans to change freely from floor to floor, and allowed us to plan a 10-story building in which every one of the ten floors is different — yet all tied together, unified, and resolved structurally, by the continuity of the 13 clusters of 4 columns that pass through each plan in the same positions.
This example gives a hint of future structures in which similar syncopated structural arrays can make possible an underlying organic structural order in large buildings.
#book/The Nature of Order/3 A Vision of a Living World/6 Positive space in engineering structure and geometry#