I wanted to see if this was an actual real thing that had happened, because, you know, we’ve had all-glass skyscrapers for ages, and I’ve never heard of this happening before.
It is. Of course the problem isn’t the building’s glass exterior. It’s that it’s curved:
Which is incredible because anyone with a rudimentary grasp of physics could have told them that this would happen:
So in addition to being heavy-handed satire about first world excess, it’s also a pretty on-point reminder of another way we’re going wrong: resurgent anti-intellectualism means that fewer and fewer people are consulting with or listening to scientists.
Anyway, back to your joke.
I think this is better/worse than you think cause the architect’s had the same problem with at least one other building (its in las Vegas? I think, I’m on mobile sorry) and at some point it kind of stops looking like an accident.
One of frank gehry’s wavy buildings is very shiney and has a similar problem and they had to sandblast it.
This building was designed with extensive consultation with engineers/scientists/etc (cause you know it’d happened before…) So that wasn’t really the problem in this case. And either all of these people got it wrong or, so they claim, during construction the buildings curvature was changed enough from the design values that it became a problem again (construction values being slightly different to design values happens quite often though). Its kind of more of an example of intellectualism going wrong cause the practicalities weren’t considered only the theoretical though…
But yeah multiple people signed off on this including scientists engineers and intellectuals which makes it worse
fearlessstateofmind backup 