Cornell alleges that the firm Pei Cobb Freed & Partners committed 'architectural malpractice' in its plans for the new wing of the museum, leading to structural deficiencies, cavities in the roof, cracks in the ceiling and other problems. The university says it has suffered 'at least' $1.1 million in damages as a result of the flawed designs. Pei, who also designed the original museum in 1968, was hired by the university to build the addition in 2006. — The Ithaca Voice
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http://www.archdaily.com/628639/henry-n-cobb-awarded-architectural-league-president-s-medal/
Cobb’s most notable built work includes the John Hancock Tower
a.k.a. The Plywood Skyscraper
^actually the Hancock Tower is a fascinating study in the limitations of architectural expertise and even engineering. Here is a pretty good in depth description of what happened.
TLDR on the Hancock: Window manufacturer was using a new chemical coating which caused the glass to fail on most windows during ordinary wind conditions. This problem occurred on other less prominent buildings too, and was entirely the manufacturers fault.
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Addendum: Unrelated to the visible problem with the windows, the building swayed too much during wind. This related to insufficient stiffening / damping of the structure due to the limited understanding of complex periodic motion in large structures at that time. The Citicorp center in NY experienced a similar problem at about the same time. Also, unexpectedly, it would be possible for a strong wind to cause the building to fall over on the narrow edge! The research on these led to improvements in building codes vis-a-vis structural stiffness and damping - and engineers now routinely study the effects of wind-induced oscillations in tall buildings. None of this would be reasonably anticipated by any architect.
One of the big misconceptions I've encountered is the notion that architects know structural engineering. They don't - it's much too technical. And in fact it isn't a fully-formed body of knowledge; at the limits, engineering still encounters unknowns. The good engineers recognize this and anticipate areas that will need extra study beyond what codes or common practice prescribe. The good architects insists on bringing in good engineers on any project that isn't strictly a copy of standard building types.
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As to the Cornell suit there isn't much anyone can say. Leaks and condensation happen in ordinary construction (the kind architects don't do) pretty often. It would take a detailed study of the problems to begin to guess where the fault lay. It's often simply the owner's presumption that the involvement of an architect leads to a higher standard of construction. That's not necessarily true.
occasionally the brave ones take risks, they often get awarded.
^ awards aplenty out there.
It's the rewards I'm looking for...
I thought Hancock was about failure to spend money on wind tunnel testing of the window system.
Miles - not sure that a normal testing would have caught the window coating issue. It sounds as if it took the forensic engineers a long time doing tests of the glass in a wind tunnel to sufficiently fatigue the glazing in the way that lead to failure. Most (architectural) wind tunnel testing is looking for leaking and structural failure due to live loads over a short period of time. It doesn't last for days or weeks at constantly varying speeds.
Typically we think of buildings as structurally static elements resisting loads. It's an interesting challenge to consider the possibility of long-term fatigue due to the small motion of building components. Usually the kind of analysis you think of for mechanical or aerospace engineering, not architecture.
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