Talling building and Steel constructionAlthough there have been many advancements in building construction technology in general. Spectacular archievements have been made in the design and construction of ultrahigh-rise buildings.The early development of high-rise buildings began with structural steel framing.Reinforced concrete and stressed-skin tube systems have since been economically and competitively used in a number of structures for both residential and commercial purposes.The high-rise buildings ranging from 50 to 110 stories that are being built all over the United States are the result of innovations and development of new structual systems.Greater height entails increased column and beam sizes to make buildings more rigid so that under wind load they will not sway beyond an acceptable limit.Excessive lateral sway may cause serious recurring damage to partitions,ceilings.and other architectural details. In addition,excessive sway may cause discomfort to the occupants of the building because their perception of such motion.Structural systems of reinforced concrete,as well as steel,take full advantage of inherent potential stiffness of the total building and therefore require additional stiffening to limit the sway.In a steel structure,for example,the economy can be defined in terms of the total average quantity of steel per square foot of floor area of the building.Curve A in Fig .1 represents the average unit weight of a conventional frame with increasing numbers of stories. Curve B represents the average steel weight if the frame is protected from all lateral loads. The gap between the upper boundary and the lower boundary represents the premium for height for the traditional column-and-beam frame.Structural engineers have developed structural systems with a view to eliminating this premium.Systems in steel. Tall buildings in steel developed as a result of several types ofstructural innovations. The innovations have been applied to the construction of both office and apartment buildings.Frame with rigid belt trusses. In order to tie the exterior columns of a frame structure to the interior vertical trusses,a system of rigid belt trusses at mid-height and at the top of the building may be used. A good example of this system is the First Wisconsin Bank Building(1974) in Milwaukee.Framed tube. The maximum efficiency of the total structure of a tall building, for both strength and stiffness,to resist wind load can be achieved only if all column element can be connected to each other in such a way that the entire building acts as a hollow tube or rigid box in projecting out of the ground. This particular structural system was probably used for the first time in the 43-story reinforced concrete DeWitt Chestnut Apartment Building in Chicago. The most significant use of this system is in the twin structural steel towers of the 110-story World Trade Center building in New YorkColumn-diagonal truss tube. The exterior columns of a building can be spaced reasonably far apart and yet be made to work together as a tube by connecting them with diagonal members interesting at the centre line of the columns and beams. This simple yet extremely efficient system was used for the first time on the John Hancock Centre in Chicago, using as much steel as is normally needed for a traditional 40-story building.Bundled tube. With the continuing need for larger and taller buildings, the framed tube or the column-diagonal truss tube may be used in a bundled form to create larger tube envelopes while maintaining high efficiency. The 110-story Sears Roebuck Headquarters Building in Chicago has nine tube, bundled at the base of the building in three rows. Some of these individual tubes terminate at different heights of the building, demonstrating the unlimited architectural possibilities of this lateststructural concept. The Sears tower, at a height of 1450 ft(442m), is the world’s tallest building.Stressed-skin tube system. The tube structural system was developed for improving the resistance to lateral forces (wind and earthquake) and the control of drift (lateral building movement ) in high-rise building. The stressed-skin tube takes the tube system a step further. The development of the stressed-skin tube utilizes the façade of the building as a structural element which acts with the framed tube, thus providing an efficient way of resisting lateral loads in high-rise buildings, and resulting in cost-effective column-free interior space with a high ratio of net to gross floor area.Because of the contribution of the stressed-skin façade, the framed members of the tube require less mass, and are thus lighter and less expensive. All the typical columns and spandrel beams are standard rolled shapes,minimizing the use and cost of special built-up members. The depth requirement for the perimeter spandrel beams is also reduced, and the need for upset beams above floors, which would encroach on valuable space, is minimized. The structural system has been used on the 54-story One Mellon Bank Center in Pittburgh.Systems in concrete. While tall buildings constructed of steel had an early start, development of tall buildings of reinforced concrete progressed at a fast enough rate to provide a competitive chanllenge to structural steel systems for both office and apartment buildings.Framed tube. As discussed above, the first framed tube concept for tall buildings was used for the 43-story DeWitt Chestnut Apartment Building. In this building ,exterior columns were spaced at 5.5ft (1.68m) centers, and interior columns were used as needed to support the 8-in . -thick (20-m) flat-plate concrete slabs.Tube in tube. Another system in reinforced concrete for office buildingscombines the traditional shear wall construction with an exterior framed tube. The system consists of an outer framed tube of very closely spaced columns and an interior rigid shear wall tube enclosing the central service area. The system (Fig .2), known as the tube-in-tube system , made it possible to design the world’s present tallest (714ft or 218m)lightweight concrete building ( the 52-story One Shell Plaza Building in Houston) for the unit price of a traditional shear wall structure of only 35 stories.Systems combining both concrete and steel have also been developed, an examle of which is the composite system developed by skidmore, Owings &Merril in which an exterior closely spaced framed tube in concrete envelops an interior steel framing, thereby combining the advantages of both reinforced concrete and structural steel systems. The 52-story One Shell Square Building in New Orleans is based on this system.Steel construction refers to a broad range of building construction in which steel plays the leading role. Most steel construction consists of large-scale buildings or engineering works, with the steel generally in the form of beams, girders, bars, plates, and other members shaped through the hot-rolled process. Despite the increased use of other materials, steel construction remained a major outlet for the steel industries of the U.S, U.K, U.S.S.R, Japan, West German, France, and other steel producers in the 1970s.Early history. The history of steel construction begins paradoxically several decades before the introduction of the Bessemer and the Siemens-Martin (openj-hearth) processes made it possible to produce steel in quantities sufficient for structure use. Many of problems of steel construction were studied earlier in connection with iron construction, which began with the Coalbrookdale Bridge, built in cast iron over the Severn River in England in 1777. This and subsequent iron bridge work, inaddition to the construction of steam boilers and iron ship hulls , spurred the development of techniques for fabricating, designing, and jioning. The advantages of iron over masonry lay in the much smaller amounts of material required. The truss form, based on the resistance of the triangle to deformation, long used in timber, was translated effectively into iron, with cast iron being used for compression members-i.e, those bearing the weight of direct loading-and wrought iron being used for tension members-i.e, those bearing the pull of suspended loading.The technique for passing iron, heated to the plastic state, between rolls to form flat and rounded bars, was developed as early as 1800;by 1819 angle irons were rolled; and in 1849 the first I beams, 17.7 feet (5.4m) long , were fabricated as roof girders for a Paris railroad station.Two years later Joseph Paxton of England built the Crystal Palace for the London Exposition of 1851. He is said to have conceived the idea of cage construction-using relatively slender iron beams as a skeleton for the glass walls of a large, open structure. Resistance to wind forces in the Crystal palace was provided by diagonal iron rods. Two feature are particularly important in the history of metal construction; first, the use of latticed girder, which are small trusses, a form first developed in timber bridges and other structures and translated into metal by Paxton ; and second, the joining of wrought-iron tension members and cast-iron compression members by means of rivets inserted while hot.In 1853 the first metal floor beams were rolled for the Cooper Union Building in New York. In the light of the principal market demand for iron beams at the time, it is not surprising that the Cooper Union beams closely resembled railroad rails.The development of the Bessemer and Siemens-Martin processes in the 1850s and 1860s suddenly open the way to the use of steel for structural purpose. Stronger than iron in both tension and compression ,the newly available metal was seized on byimaginative engineers, notably by those involved in building the great number of heavy railroad bridges then in demand in Britain, Europe, and the U.S.A notable example was the Eads Bridge, also known as the St. Louis Bridge, in St. Louis (1867-1874), in which tubular steel ribs were used to form arches with a span of more than 500ft (152.5m). In Britain, the Firth of Forth cantilever bridge (1883-90) employed tubular struts, some 12 ft (3.66m) in diameter and 350 ft (107m) long. Such bridges and other structures were important in leading to the development and enforcement of standards and codification of permissible design stresses. The lack of adequate theoretical knowledge, and even of an adequate basis for theoretical studies, limited the value of stress analysis during the early years of the 20th century,as iccasionally failures,such as that of a cantilever bridge in Quebec in 1907,revealed.But failures were rare in the metal-skeleton office buildings;the simplicity of their design proved highly practical even in the absence of sophisticated analysis techniques. Throughout the first third of the century, ordinary carbon steel, without any special alloy strengthening or hardening, was universally used.The possibilities inherent in metal construction for high-rise building was demonstrated to the world by the Paris Exposition of 1889.for which Alexandre-Gustave Eiffel, a leading French bridge engineer, erected an openwork metal tower 300m (984 ft) high. Not only was the height-more than double that of the Great Pyramid-remarkable, but the speed of erection and low cost were even more so, a small crew completed the work in a few months.The first skyscrapers. Meantime, in the United States another important development was taking place. In 1884-85 Maj. William Le Baron Jenney, a Chicago engineer , had designed the Home Insurance Building, ten stories high, with a metal skeleton. Jenney’s beams were of Bessemer steel, though his columns were c ast iron. Cast iron lintels supporting masonry over window openings were, in turn, supportedon the cast iron columns. Soild masonry court and party walls provided lateral support against wind loading. Within a decade the same type of construction had been used in more than 30 office buildings in Chicago and New York. Steel played a larger and larger role in these , with riveted connections for beams and columns, sometimes strengthened for wind bracing by overlaying gusset plates at the junction of vertical and horizontal members. Light masonry curtain walls, supported at each floor level, replaced the old heavy masonry curtain walls, supported at each floor level , replaced the old heavy masonry.Though the new construction form was to remain centred almost entirely in America for several decade, its impact on the steel industry was worldwide. By the last years of the 19th century, the basic structural shapes-I beams up to 20 in. ( 0.508m) in depth and Z and T shapes of lesser proportions were readily available, to combine with plates of several widths and thicknesses to make efficient members of any required size and strength. In 1885 the heaviest structural shape produced through hot-rolling weighed less than 100 pounds (45 kilograms) per foot; decade by decade this figure rose until in the 1960s it exceeded 700 pounds (320 kilograms) per foot.Coincident with the introduction of structural steel came the introduction of the Otis electric elevator in 1889. The demonstration of a safe passenger elevator, together with that of a safe and economical steel construction method, sent building heights soaring. In New York the 286-ft (87.2-m) Flatiron Building of 1902 was surpassed in 1904 by the 375-ft (115-m) Times Building ( renamed the Allied Chemical Building) , the 468-ft (143-m) City Investing Company Building in Wall Street, the 612-ft (187-m) Singer Building (1908), the 700-ft (214-m) Metropolitan Tower (1909) and, in 1913, the 780-ft (232-m) Woolworth Building.The rapid increase in height and the height-to-width ratio brought problems. To limit street congestion, building setback design was prescribed. On the technical side,the problem of lateral support was studied. A diagonal bracing system, such as that used in the Eiffel Tower, was not architecturally desirable in offices relying on sunlight for illumination. The answer was found in greater reliance on the bending resistance of certain individual beams and columns strategically designed into the skeletn frame, together with a high degree of rigidity sought at the junction of the beams and columns. With today’s modern interior lighting systems, however, diagonal bracing against wind loads has returned; one notable example is the John Hancock Center in Chicago, where the external X-braces form a dramatic part of the structure’s façade.World War I brought an interruption to the boom in what had come to be called skyscrapers (the origin of the word is uncertain), but in the 1920s New York saw a resumption of the height race, culminating in the Empire State Building in the 1931. The Empire State’s 102 stories (1,250ft. [381m]) were to keep it established as the hightest building in the world for the next 40 years. Its speed of the erection demonstrated how thoroughly the new construction technique had been mastered. A depot across the bay at Bayonne, N.J., supplied the girders by lighter and truck on a schedule operated with millitary precision; nine derricks powerde by electric hoists lifted the girders to position; an industrial-railway setup moved steel and other material on each floor. Initial connections were made by bolting , closely followed by riveting, followed by masonry and finishing. The entire job was completed in one year and 45 days.The worldwide depression of the 1930s and World War II provided another interruption to steel construction development, but at the same time the introduction of welding to replace riveting provided an important advance.Joining of steel parts by metal are welding had been successfully achieved by the end of the 19th century and was used in emergency ship repairs during World War I,but its application to construction was limited until after World War II. Another advance in the same area had been the introduction of high-strength bolts to replace rivets in field connections.Since the close of World War II, research in Europe, the U.S., and Japan has greatly extended knowledge of the behavior of different types of structural steel under varying stresses, including those exceeding the yield point, making possible more refined and systematic analysis. This in turn has led to the adoption of more liberal design codes in most countries, more imaginative design made possible by so-called plastic design ?The introduction of the computer by short-cutting tedious paperwork, made further advances and savings possible.。
