Archinect - News

New scientific study provides vital data on sinking Chinese cities

2024-04-23T15:08:00-04:00

The toll of urbanization in China has been documented in a new paper published in the journal Science by a team of researchers from different institutions around the country. Using a method called spaceborne synthetic aperture radar interferometry (or InSAR), they were able to establish the rate at which land is subsiding in major cities, affecting over a third (36%) of the country's urban population.

The paper's abstract states that 45% of metro areas surveyed are now subsiding faster than 3 millimeters per year, with another 16% subsiding faster than 10 millimeters per year. By 2120, upwards of 26% of all coastal lands will have elevations below sea level. The source of the sinking is the combined weight of buildings and the depletion of groundwater around urban areas. "Our results underscore the necessity of enhancing protective measures to mitigate potential damages from subsidence," the authors stated.

These latest findings could potentially have bearings on the work of Turensc...

San Francisco's Millennium Tower is sinking again despite foundational corrections

2024-02-22T17:52:00-05:00

San Francisco’s ill-fated Millennium Tower is making headlines once again for problems taking place beneath its turbulent foundation.

This time, the 58-story skyscraper is sinking even further on its vertical axis as it settles to the north and west, alarming some building scientists who feel the movement could result in significant corrosive damage despite some recent positive corrections.

Engineers say a fix that has been previously made to anchor its foundation into bedrock on the north and west sides has mostly failed to produce the 4-inch reversal their advanced data models had predicted, instead posting a correction of just a quarter-inch a year and, as outside experts surmised, causing the new directional shift that's happening in an unexpected area.

Now, the building is sinking from underneath the center of its foundation mat at a rate of one-tenth of an inch per year. The phenomenon is known as "dishing." A local geothermal engineer who is monitoring the issue told NBC Bay...

Research from Northwestern University finds the drastic effects of 'underground climate change' in downtown Chicago

2023-07-18T11:44:00-04:00

“Underground climate change is a silent hazard,” he said. “The ground is deforming as a result of temperature variations, and no existing civil structure or infrastructure is designed to withstand these variations.”

NBC Chicago reports on research from Northwestern University Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering Alessandro Rotta Loria and his findings on the effect of density and subterranean heat in the city’s downtown Loop, where temperatures have been shown to be 10 degrees Celsius higher than in Grant Park and another 25 compared to outlying areas.

Loria called the phenomenon “subsurface heat islands.” Chicago’s clay underpinnings are wilting under the change, causing a sink of up to 8 millimeters, or more than four times the 1 to 2mm sink found by researchers in Manhattan recently (Chicago also has a deeper bedrock). Preventative thermal upgrades must be enacted, and mitigating the effort will also require the use of heat recovery technologies, according to the study.

San Francisco's Millennium Tower is tilting even further, despite engineering fixes

2023-06-15T16:54:00-04:00

Despite initial progress in the first phase of the so-called fix earlier this year, the sinking and leaning Millennium Tower in San Francisco is now tilting more to the west than ever, according to monitoring data reviewed by NBC Bay Area’s Investigative Unit. The tower is currently leaning more than 29 inches at the northwest corner of Fremont and Mission streets, much of the added tilt occurring during the digging needed to prepare to support the tower along two sides.

The data came from a rooftop monitoring system, which the fix’s chief engineer Ron Hamburger said was less reliable than the one contained in its foundation before stating the half-inch tilt recorded was "negligible."

A geotechnical engineer working on the $100 million project expressed his dismay to reporters, saying: "You spend all this money, but you still have an uncertain result long term."

The structure is leaning so much that some involved think it could potentially be red-tagged in the aftermath of a major earthquake, which the U.S. Geological Survey says has a 20% likelihood of occurring in the next 30 years.

New York City is actually sinking under the weight of its skyscrapers

2023-05-22T13:57:00-04:00

New York City is sinking under the weight of its skyscrapers, new research shows, which could put its population of more than 8 million people at an increased risk of coastal flooding. [...] Researchers estimated the weight of all of New York City’s buildings to be around 842 million tons. But to find the areas more vulnerable to sinking — or, as they call it in more scientific terms, “subsidence” — a key factor to consider was the type of soil beneath the buildings.

A new study authored by the United States Geological Survey (USGS) found the city to be sinking at a rate of between 1 to 2 millimeters per year, while parts of Lower Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island are subsiding at a rate of 2.75 millimeters. This comes at a time when planning officials, architects, and building owners are scrambling to adapt to the shrinking office market accelerated by the pandemic.

The increased flood risk, enhanced by construction densification, is particularly dangerous to coastal cities whose clay-rich soil causes “material softness and ability to flow under pressure,” according to the study.

Indonesia begins construction on new Nusantara capital city in Borneo

2023-01-24T17:54:00-05:00

Indonesia expects to begin construction in the second quarter on apartments worth $2.7 billion for thousands of civil servants due to move to its new capital city on Borneo island, an official said late on Tuesday. Authorities have already started building basic infrastructure in the area, with an aim to start relocating some government administration and civil servants in 2024.

The 450,000-acre starter city’s initial residential program will include 184 apartment towers for a total of 14,500 government employees. AECOM and Nikken Sekkei are leading the development of its master plan towards an expected inauguration date to coincide with the country’s Independence Day on the 17th of August next year. Officials previously decided that the seat of power’s future in Jakarta is untenable owing to increased flood risk, rising sea levels, and a rapid rate of sinking that has been recorded up to 11 inches per year in certain areas.

The Millennium Tower is now sliding as it sinks (and tilts)

2022-03-01T11:06:00-05:00

It’s doing it (again). San Francisco’s Millennium Tower is on the move once more, this time in an entirely different dimension as the 13-year-old building is sliding while it sinks and tilts.

Now the tower is said to be moving to the east, specifically. The firm in charge of stabilizing the former Handel project testified the 58-story building’s “horizontal movement” in documents that were provided to the city during last year, according to NBC Bay Area.

The reflection of a building and crane on Millennium Tower's (301 Mission Street) curtainwall glass. Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons user Hydrogen Iodide.

Ron Hamburger is back again as the engineer telling everybody they were essentially fine to occupy and that the building’s shift left has added another half inch since beginning construction on the perimeter pile upgrade late last summer, coupling with the 24-inch tilt on the roof to create an inch-wide gap between the tower’s foundation mat and adjacent building's five-floor und...

San Francisco’s infamous Millennium Tower is still sinking… and it may be running out of time

2022-01-11T19:35:00-05:00

[...] Millennium Tower – a luxury condominium where star athletes and retired Google employees bought multimillion-dollar apartments before they realized it was sinking – is continuing to sink and tilt to the side by about 3in (7.5 cm) a year, according to the engineer responsible for fixing the troubled building.

At that rate, the building’s elevators and sewage systems would cease to function within a few years according to engineer Ron Hamburger’s report to the city’s municipal Board of Supervisors last week. He also told the 11-member body that the movement was inevitable, adding that, based on his observations, the degradation would continue “whether we are conducting work at the site or not.”

Hamburger did reportedly declare the building safe for use, however, stating that the placement of 18 steel piles in the bedrock of the structure would help significantly increase its stability.

The 58-story Handel Architects-designed tower became a headache for the property managers shortly after opening in 2009 to considerable fanfare. Repairs had to be halted back in August after it was discovered to be sinking at an accelerated rate just weeks after the $100 million rescue scheme had begun. The sinking process has thus far reaped a lot of unwelcome consequences, although some inventive onlook...

Work on San Francisco's Millennium Tower repair halted after further sinking discovered

2021-08-30T13:24:00-04:00

Work on the $100 million fix of the Millennium tower has halted as engineers scramble to figure out why the building has suddenly sunk an inch in a matter of weeks since construction began, NBC Bay Area’s Investigative Unit has learned.

The “perimeter pile upgrade” project, paid for as part of a confidential settlement reached last year, is designed to reinforce the foundation of the 58-story, luxury Millennium Tower after it had been discovered in 2016 that the northwest corner of the structure had sunk 16 inches since its opening in 2009. Fast forward to 2018, an inspection revealed the building had descended an additional two inches.

Previously on Archinect: Settlement reached for sinking Millennium Tower in San Francisco

The upgrade project was developed over several years and calls for the installation of 52 concrete, 140,000-pound piles that would anchor the building to bedrock approximately 250 feet below ground. However, shortly after work began on the stabilization project in May, apparent acceleration in both the tower’s sinking and tilting to the west has appeared. And, as reported by NBC Bay Area, the foundation has sunk an inch since the start of the work, resulting in a tilt of 22 inches.

The Milleni...

This conceptual sound installation will let San Franciscans “hear” the sinking Millennium Tower

2019-11-15T15:42:00-05:00

Creating a work about the sinking high-rise was an easy choice, according to Martínez. “We started researching San Francisco, and current events in the city, and the Millennium Tower popped up,” Martínez said. “We knew almost instantly we wanted to do a project that was in some way going to connect with some of most expensive real estate on earth collapsing under the weight of itself as a metaphor for late capitalism.”

Cristóbal Martínez and Kade L. Twist of interdisciplinary arts collective Postcommodity were compelled to make an art piece based on the sinking, tilting Handel Architects-designed Millennium Tower in San Francisco, as a timely metaphor for late capitalism collapsing under the weight of itself. The duo made a data map of the tower's minuscule movements and created a conceptual sound-art piece called “The Point of Final Collapse.”

Starting today, the piece will be played for 4 minutes at 5 p.m. from the tower at San Francisco Art Institute's campus on North Beach, and projected to Downtown San Francisco via long-range acoustic devices. The piece will play every day until the tower is fixed or torn down, the artists say in the article.

Thailand considers moving capital to ease overcrowding in Bangkok

2019-09-23T14:39:00-04:00

Citing overcrowded conditions in Bangkok, Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha has said moving the capital is a possibility. [...] “There are two possible approaches to moving the capital,” Prayut said. “The first is finding a city that’s neither too far nor too expensive to move to. The second is to decentralise the urban area to outer Bangkok to reduce crowding.”

In August, another Southeast Asian nation, Indonesia, announced that it had picked a site for an as-yet-unnamed new capital — away from the sinking and increasingly congested current capital Jakarta.

Egypt has also been working to move its capital out of the wildly sprawling 'old' Cairo.

As Jakarta sinks, Indonesia picks jungle site in Borneo for its new capital city

2019-08-26T18:30:00-04:00

President Joko Widodo announced Monday that officials had chosen an area in East Kalimantan province, on the island of Borneo, for the as-yet-unnamed capital. Construction on the 450,000-acre site would start next year, and people would move in beginning in 2024. [...] Critics of the plan have warned that the cost of moving the capital could be untenable. [...] What’s more, shifting civil servants and their families to a new city in Borneo will not stop Jakarta from sinking, they say.

With some areas of Jakarta sinking as much as 10 inches a year, caused by the digging of underground aquifers and worsened by climate change, the need to relocate the capital has become more pressing in recent years.

The effort will cost an estimated $33 billion, President Widodo said during his Monday announcement, The Washington Post reports.

San Francisco's sinking Millennium Tower: new $100 million plan promises 'cheaper' fix

2018-12-07T15:48:00-05:00

All sides in the Millennium Tower debacle appear to be nearing an agreement on a $100 million-plus fix to stop the 58-story high-rise from sinking further [...] The latest plan calls for drilling piles into bedrock from the sidewalk on the building’s southwest corner. The proposal would be less extensive and intrusive than the plan floated in April, which called for drilling as many as 300 micro-piles to bedrock through the building’s concrete foundation.

A new crack appears in San Francisco's sinking Millennium Tower

2018-09-10T16:32:00-04:00

A large crack formed in a window at the sinking and tilting Millennium Tower over the Labor Day weekend, prompting officials there to block off part of the sidewalk on Mission Street as a precaution, NBC Bay Area’s Investigative Unit has learned. City inspectors issued a notice of violation on Tuesday, giving the Millennium management 72 hours to report back on the extent of the problem and the soundness of the building’s façade in light of the failure.

The latest safety concern over San Francisco's sinking Millennium Tower occurred Labor Day weekend when residents heard creaking sounds followed by a loud popping noise in the building. Soon after the incident a resident living on the 36th floor found a crack in his window. The high rise is currently tilting about 18 inches when measured at the top.

Concerns over another sinking building in San Francisco

2018-06-28T16:17:00-04:00

In a city where a tilting 58-story tower has attracted international attention, the construction of big buildings now is scrutinized for any sign that a newcomer might be causing structural damage to its neighbors. Which is why a full investigation was launched this winter after an anonymous complaint that the excavations for a pair of new, extra-tall towers were harming the 18-story high-rise in between. And the scrutiny is certain to continue [...].

"The building in question is 25 Jessie St., an 18-story tower from the early 1980s," reports the SF Chronicle, and so far the structure has only sunk less than an inch—far less than the infamous Millennium "Leaning" Tower just two blocks away that has sunk 17 inches and tilted 14 inches to the east over the past ten years.

San Francisco's sinking Millennium Tower now emitting unsafe odors found to be a fire hazard

2017-12-19T13:36:00-05:00

In a December 2016 assessment of the issue obtained by NBC Bay Area, Palo Alto-based building consultants Allana Buick & Bers Inc. trace the odors to openings between the building’s façade, or curtain wall, and the core structure. The consultants point to the “excessive” settlement as a likely source of the issue, adding, “This condition may be more widespread than these two test areas and may be present in the entire stack. We recommend further investigation of this issue.”

New fire hazards have been found in San Francisco's infamous Millennium Tower, making the luxury high-rise that has sunk 17 inches since 2009 even less safe than previously thought. According to a December 2016 assessment carried out by building consultants Allana Buick & Bers Inc., gaps between the building's walls and structural frame have been found. These openings "represent a breach in the fire and smoke barrier" that in the event of a fire, would allow smoke to jump floors posing a huge safety risk to the occupants.

Allana Buick & Bers Inc. were hired by condo owner Paula Pretlow to assess the tower in order to trace the source of foul orders that had been plaguing the occupant. The consultants discovered that smells were likely coming from gaps that had occurred as a result of the structure's settlement. However, these findings were redacted from the copy of the report they returned to Pretlow.

Pretlow has spent a year in court fighting to see the original reports and after ...

SF Millennium Tower continues to sink; engineers suggest a possible fix

2017-07-19T17:29:00-04:00

A fix appears to be in the works for San Francisco’s sinking and tilting Millennium Tower — just as a new report estimates the 58-story luxury high-rise has sunk yet another inch in the past seven months. [...] That lean is now up to nearly 14 inches at the building’s roof — an additional 2-plus inches more than the tilt measured in January.

A pair of engineering firms hired by developer Millennium Partners think there's still hope to save the troubled structure and straighten it up again: "The LERA firm and DeSimone Consulting Engineers say the problem can be remedied by drilling 50 to 100 new piles down to bedrock from the building’s basement," the Chronicle reports. "The engineering firms estimate the fix will cost $100 million to $150 million — more than your average home foundation repair, but a lot less than the billion-dollar-plus price tag that some experts have feared."

Urgency is increasing though as a new engineering report by Arup Group presents evidence that the rate of sinking remains steady and cracking in the basement continues.

Still no end in sight of San Francisco's 'Leaning Tower' fiasco

2017-01-05T13:01:00-05:00

Pamela Buttery lives on the 57th floor. To demonstrate how her home tilts slightly to the left, Buttery hits a golf ball straight ahead toward the window. [...] The ball takes a sharp left turn toward the direction of the tilt, and it ends up in the northwest corner of her living room. [...] How to fix the tower, or at least keep it from leaning even more? Some solutions include pouring a concrete collar around the foundation or building a buttress.

Representatives of the sinking luxury condo tower put the blame on the Transbay Transit Center, a sizable new train and bus terminal currently under construction nearby:

"Millennium spokesman P.J. Johnston says workers have been pumping out huge amounts of water as they tunnel through the soil. Johnston says that process, known as dewatering, is destabilizing the ground. [...] Johnston says engineers have inspected the tower and confirm it's safe."

Many of the million-dollar-property owners at this now infamous address aren't easily quietened though, and a permanent engineering fix has yet to be found.

The troubled structure previously in the Archinect news:

Luxury condos sink in San Francisco's Millennium Tower

2016-08-03T12:36:00-04:00

San Francisco's Millennium Tower has been sinking at a rate of two inches per year since it was completed in 2008, which is about ten inches more than the builders had anticipated the building settling for its entire lifetime. Not to be boring, the tower is also tilting slightly to the northwest, giving the multi-million dollar residences within the building a slightly different view of the city and, perhaps, their investment. As the SFGate reports, while some blame the nearby Transbay Transit Center site dig for the sink, others noted that the building had sunk at least ten inches by the time the excavation began. But not to worry, officials say:

At the same time, geotechnical reports show that since 2009, the settling has been uneven — resulting in the 2-inch tilt.

And while Stanford’s Deierlein doesn’t consider the sink or tilt a safety issue, he did say, “I would be concerned for my investment.” That’s because a shifting building can cause walls to crack, elevators to malfunction...

As mining threatens Kiruna, the city plans for possible demolition and relocation two miles east

2015-08-03T19:57:00-04:00

In a highly unusual case of urbanism, the whole town centre and its surrounding neighbourhoods are to be demolished...The 3,050 homes that would be affected by the impact of the mining – in addition to shops, offices, schools, the city hall and the hospital – will all be bought by [the LKAB mining company], knocked down and relocated. The process of moving the city will happen in phases, with the majority estimated to be completed by 2040.

Rapid mining activity in Kiruna is already posing a serious threat to the city, to the point that the mining company LKAB plans to relocate the entire municipality two miles eastward to prevent buildings from collapsing into the mine. The Guardian gives an overview on how locals are reacting to the relocation proposal, and how those two miles could completely change everything.

Chinese Cities Are Sinking Due to Excess Groundwater Use and Rapid Growth

2012-04-03T19:35:00-04:00

New studies are showing that Chinese cities are slowly sinking as a result of rapid development and excess groundwater use. According to reports, as many as 50 cities across the country are affected by soil subsidence, including the country’s largest - Shanghai. Apparently, Shanghai has been slowly sinking for at least 90 years.