Word: trusswork
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...main structural support, the Freedom Tower will also employ an increasingly popular triangular-grid trusswork. From a defensive standpoint, structural strength, even more so than fire safety, is the most important consideration for tall buildings. "A square is not a geometrically stable shape," says Childs. "A triangle is stable because it has a diagonal." The Trade Center towers fell because intense fires eventually melted their interior steel. But their structural systems permitted both towers to remain standing after the initial impact of massive jetliners. So for the new 52-story headquarters of the New York Times, the construction of which...
...kind at the Trade Center that were easily sliced by the intruding planes. "There are many ways," says Childs, "that this building is responding to the exact event that caused the tragedy." For its main structural support, the Freedom Tower will also employ an increasingly popular triangular-grid trusswork. From a defensive standpoint, structural strength, even more so than fire safety, is the most important consideration for tall buildings. "A square is not a geometrically stable shape," says Childs. "A triangle is stable because it has a diagonal." The Trade Center towers fell because intense fires eventually melted their interior...
What is new here is the brashness with which Jahn has combined these elements and his audacity in applying them to a government building. He makes a daring and largely successful attempt to draw stark materials into a tumultuous play of form and light. The skeins of trusswork, the rippling stairways and the wafflepatterned underside of the terraces combine in an optical tangle compounded by a riot of reflecting surfaces. Without resorting to molded ornament, the atrium reaches toward a rococo extravagance. Says Jahn: "Elements that break the norm --romance, fantasy, surprise--are what put architecture beyond engineering...
...paintings of Delaunay, like A Window, 1912-13, which had been seen in Berlin in 1913. Its light-filled space, saturated with color-not the sober browns and grays of cubism, but the full radiance of the spectrum from high yellow through to ultramarine, with a vestigial slice of trusswork from the Eiffel Tower rising in the top third of the painting to remind one that this was a view of Paris-made a deep impression on the young German, to whom color had an absolute value. But instead of following Delaunay into abstraction, he grafted his color system onto...
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