The history of skyscrapers
We talked about the tallest skyscrapers of Russia and the world , but did not go deep into their history. Therefore, this time I propose to look hundreds of years ago - at a time when there were no skyscrapers with steel frames, but people tried to build buildings that even now are striking in their scale, and in the near past - at the time of the first skyscrapers.
The first to come to mind when talking about the highest structures of antiquity come the Egyptian pyramids. The Great Pyramid of Giza, 4,500 years old, was the tallest building on Earth before 1300, that is, 3,900 years.
140-meter pyramid was built on the orders of Pharaoh Cheops. If it were more like a residential building, it would now fall under the definition of a skyscraper in terms of height. For comparison: a high-rise building on the Red Gate Square, one of the “Stalin sisters”, reaches 138 meters.
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On the island of Sardinia to the XV century BC. e. erected a whole complex of defensive towers-nurag , which had, perhaps, a religious mission. The height of the highest of the towers was originally about 19 meters, now the destroyed structures have become much lower. 19 meters - this is more than five-story Khrushchev.
The Taj Mahal Mosque Mausoleum, a magnificent building in Agra, India, was built in 1653. Now the Taj Mahal is a museum that attracts a huge number of tourists. Unfortunately, as in the case of the Pyramid of Cheops, a large part of the original beauty of this building is lost due to looting. For example, we will not see a 10-meter golden spire cut by British colonialists. Guides also talk about pearl threads connecting the four towers to the central dome.
The height of the mausoleum is 73 meters. For comparison: it is considered to be the first skyscraper building House insurance, built in 1885 in Chicago office height of 42 meters. Another mausoleum is closer to this size - the 46-meter Halicarnassian mausoleum.
The mausoleum in Halicarnassus , unfortunately, did not live up to us. In the photo below - its miniature copy. He was able to stand 19 centuries, and in the XIII century was destroyed by an earthquake. The remains of the building dismantled for the construction of the fortress of St.. Petra.
Among the tallest buildings have always been religious buildings. The Cathedral of St. Basil the Blessed on Red Square in Moscow in height reaches 65 meters. Porcelain pagoda , built in 1422, towered over the Chinese Nanjing to a height of 78 meters. The 81-meter bell tower of Ivan the Great on Cathedral Square of the Moscow Kremlin until the middle of the 20th century remained the tallest building in the capital of Russia. The height of the Smolny Cathedral in St. Petersburg - 93.7 meters, and in fact the bell tower of the cathedral could be 140 meters in height. Cologne Cathedral, founded in 1248, reaches 157 meters in height.
In addition to individual buildings and complexes, there is a whole “city of skyscrapers” - Shibam in Yemen. Today, the highest clay buildings in the world are located in Shibam - up to 30 meters or more. Among them is the tallest house - 11-storey.
The reason for the unusual architecture is the desire to protect residents from Bedouin raids. Houses had to be built inside the city walls, it was not possible to expand them. Houses grew, tapering upwards, and some of them were even connected by balconies so that you could move from one house to another. The oldest of the Shibam houses dates back to 1609. Materials and climate do not allow houses to stand longer; on average, the lifetime of clay buildings in this city is up to three hundred years.
As can be seen from the previous section, people could have built a tall building, be it a religious building or a house, hundreds of years ago. The problem was the feasibility of such construction. Overpopulated areas were not so much as today. Shibam is an exception to the rule. Of course, the industrial revolution played a huge role. Capitalism became the dominant world economic system, large companies began to emerge, which needed their own offices and buildings. And walking on many floors is so-so pleasure.
Elevator used BC. In the Coliseum of elevators were 28 pieces - they lifted the load to 300 kilograms to a height of more than 7 meters. Thus, lions in cages were raised to the arena. At the same time - up to 100 lions found themselves in the arena. The block system worked in such a way that the cells opened when they were at the right level. Archaeologists spent several years reconstructing one of the elevators and releasing the symbol of Rome - the she-wolf. The system worked on human strength. Similar elevators were found in other ancient structures, sometimes animals were used as lifting force.
Ivan Kulibin on the orders of Catherine II in the 1790s built a screw elevator instead of a winch. The base of the armchair was fastened to the long axis-screw, and the servants lifted the empress to the necessary floor of the Winter Palace. 50 years earlier, the palace of Louis XV was equipped with a winch lift. But one thing is to raise a chair or a platform for several floors, and quite another is to make such a system safe and secure, and also accessible not only to kings.
Elisha Graves Otis was born in 1811. He tried to do business, worked as a mechanic in a bed factory, and besides this he patented a “catcher”. His system made it possible to hold a load when a cable or rope was broken when people or equipment were lifted to the upper floors of buildings. Otis was able to effectively present the invention to the general public: he was on the platform at the moment when his assistant cut the rope with his sword. The platform did not fall down thanks to the catcher. A few years after the inventor's death, his sons opened Otis and in 6 years installed more than 2,000 elevators in US offices and hotels. In 1878, the first Otis passenger hydraulic elevator appeared, and in 1889 an electrically operated elevator.
Hydraulic elevators implied the presence of an underground mine filled with water, the height of the house itself. The piston in the shaft of the cylinder under the pressure of water pushed the cab up. Later the elevator was improved by placing the cylinder horizontally. Elevators on hydraulic pumps were installed on the Eiffel Tower . To lift passengers up to 175 meters from the Earth, two hydraulic elevators were needed at once - the cabs served as a counterweight to each other. Halfway had to do a transplant. Such elevators could not work in the winter, and they were replaced with electric ones.
Initially, hydraulic elevators moved much faster than electric and steam options, but they were harder to install. It was the elevators with electric drive and safety systems that allowed skyscrapers to grow upwards. Today, the fastest elevators are installed in the Taipei 101 tower in the capital of Taiwan, they move at a speed of more than 60 kilometers per hour, lifting people from the fifth to the eighty-ninth floor in 39 seconds.
Among the criteria that determine whether a building is a skyscraper, now there is a height, the presence of a steel frame and the purpose of a particular structure. The 10-storey building insurance house in Chicago is considered the first skyscraper: its height is 42 meters, which at that time was a good result, it is designed to accommodate offices, and the steel frame is used in the construction. It was built in 1885.
The idea of ​​the framework suggested by the architect William Le Baron Jenny , "the father of skyscrapers." Usually the role of the supporting structure was performed by external walls. The use of steel, which is many times stronger than concrete or brickwork, has reduced the total weight of the structure.
In the building of house insurance, they did not completely abandon the supporting walls. A few years later, the supporting frame was used in the construction of the Wenwright storey tower .
It should be said that in 1870, before the construction of the above-mentioned skyscrapers, a 40-meter office building of the Equitable Life Building was built in New York. Sometimes it is called the first skyscraper - only because of the frame, it does not fall into the general classification. It was the first office building with passenger elevators - hydraulic models from Otis' company.
Equitable Life Building
The criterion for the presence of the steel frame is no longer absolutely necessary. In 1998, in the capital of Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur, they built two 88-storey skyscrapers connected by a bridge on ball bearings. For the construction used elastic concrete, reinforced with quartz and comparable in strength to steel. But the mass of a skyscraper is twice that of buildings of similar size. The height of the buildings is 451 meters, including the spire.
Moreover, the tallest building in the world is not built on a steel frame. For the construction of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the United Arab Emirates, also used specially designed concrete that can withstand temperatures up to 48 degrees Celsius. Concrete was laid at night, adding ice to the solution.
The same company that built one of the Petronas Towers - Samsung - built the tower of Burj Khalifa.
Petronas Towers, Malaysia
Tom Cruise on Burj Khalifa, Dubai, UAE
Burj Khalifa
In 1912, in Moscow, they built a “techerez” - the House of cheap apartments Nirnsee with a height of over 40 meters. In 1908, the highest civilian building in the city was the 78-meter Telephone Station in Milyutinsky Lane. But the flight of engineering in Russia was artificially restrained by aesthetic and religious considerations - these tall buildings were lower than the Ivan the Great Bell Tower. All changed the "Stalin sisters."
If we talk about the United States, the builders had some other problems, such as imperfect elevators and pumps, which did not allow raising water to the highest floors. These tasks were soon dealt with, but with the growth of buildings, new challenges arose.
In the United States in the years 1913-1915 built a 40-storey Equitable Building . The 164-meter-high skyscraper cast such a shadow on the city that at midday it deprived of sunlight the houses on an area of ​​30 thousand square meters. To avoid such problems in the future, in New York, a law was passed, according to which the building was to be raised with ledges. So there were skyscrapers with a contoured shape.
Manhattan, 1932. Results of the Law on Zoning
The higher the building - the more it is influenced by natural conditions. The height of Taipei 101 in the capital of Taiwan is more than half a kilometer. Typhoons and earthquakes are characteristic of Southeast Asia. The tower has already withstood several earthquakes and stands quietly with any gusts of wind. Moreover, the people in this tower do not suffer from "air sickness", they do not feel pitching at high altitude.
The danger of collapse reduces the ball-pendulum, installed between 87 and 91 floors of the 101-storey building. The ball weighs 660 tons and allows you to compensate for gusts of wind. And the frame of the building is very durable, but not rigid, so it cannot simply “break”.
Taipei 101, Taiwan
Each high-rise building is a new challenge. The Shanghai Tower has a twisted structure to fight the wind and a double shell to maintain temperature. The platform for the Petronas towers had to be moved 60 meters to allow the twins to stand on the same type of soil, and the material for them needed to be produced exclusively in Malaysia - therefore a special sort of concrete was created for them.
Of the complex Russian projects, a skyscraper on the Red Gate Square should be noted. Under one of the buildings of the 138-meter high-rise building is located the lobby of the metro, which was built simultaneously with the house. For some time, the “turtles” would have to be tilted at the edge of the pit, and after the precipitation of the soil, he would necessarily bend over. To avoid this, the building was built with a slope, and the soil was frozen according to the technology used in the construction of the metro. The ground melted, the building sagged and fell strictly (almost) vertically. The task was so difficult to miscalculate that a similar method was not used anywhere else.
The tallest buildings and structures of antiquity
The first to come to mind when talking about the highest structures of antiquity come the Egyptian pyramids. The Great Pyramid of Giza, 4,500 years old, was the tallest building on Earth before 1300, that is, 3,900 years.
140-meter pyramid was built on the orders of Pharaoh Cheops. If it were more like a residential building, it would now fall under the definition of a skyscraper in terms of height. For comparison: a high-rise building on the Red Gate Square, one of the “Stalin sisters”, reaches 138 meters.
')
On the island of Sardinia to the XV century BC. e. erected a whole complex of defensive towers-nurag , which had, perhaps, a religious mission. The height of the highest of the towers was originally about 19 meters, now the destroyed structures have become much lower. 19 meters - this is more than five-story Khrushchev.
The Taj Mahal Mosque Mausoleum, a magnificent building in Agra, India, was built in 1653. Now the Taj Mahal is a museum that attracts a huge number of tourists. Unfortunately, as in the case of the Pyramid of Cheops, a large part of the original beauty of this building is lost due to looting. For example, we will not see a 10-meter golden spire cut by British colonialists. Guides also talk about pearl threads connecting the four towers to the central dome.
The height of the mausoleum is 73 meters. For comparison: it is considered to be the first skyscraper building House insurance, built in 1885 in Chicago office height of 42 meters. Another mausoleum is closer to this size - the 46-meter Halicarnassian mausoleum.
The mausoleum in Halicarnassus , unfortunately, did not live up to us. In the photo below - its miniature copy. He was able to stand 19 centuries, and in the XIII century was destroyed by an earthquake. The remains of the building dismantled for the construction of the fortress of St.. Petra.
Among the tallest buildings have always been religious buildings. The Cathedral of St. Basil the Blessed on Red Square in Moscow in height reaches 65 meters. Porcelain pagoda , built in 1422, towered over the Chinese Nanjing to a height of 78 meters. The 81-meter bell tower of Ivan the Great on Cathedral Square of the Moscow Kremlin until the middle of the 20th century remained the tallest building in the capital of Russia. The height of the Smolny Cathedral in St. Petersburg - 93.7 meters, and in fact the bell tower of the cathedral could be 140 meters in height. Cologne Cathedral, founded in 1248, reaches 157 meters in height.
In addition to individual buildings and complexes, there is a whole “city of skyscrapers” - Shibam in Yemen. Today, the highest clay buildings in the world are located in Shibam - up to 30 meters or more. Among them is the tallest house - 11-storey.
The reason for the unusual architecture is the desire to protect residents from Bedouin raids. Houses had to be built inside the city walls, it was not possible to expand them. Houses grew, tapering upwards, and some of them were even connected by balconies so that you could move from one house to another. The oldest of the Shibam houses dates back to 1609. Materials and climate do not allow houses to stand longer; on average, the lifetime of clay buildings in this city is up to three hundred years.
Technological background
As can be seen from the previous section, people could have built a tall building, be it a religious building or a house, hundreds of years ago. The problem was the feasibility of such construction. Overpopulated areas were not so much as today. Shibam is an exception to the rule. Of course, the industrial revolution played a huge role. Capitalism became the dominant world economic system, large companies began to emerge, which needed their own offices and buildings. And walking on many floors is so-so pleasure.
Elevator used BC. In the Coliseum of elevators were 28 pieces - they lifted the load to 300 kilograms to a height of more than 7 meters. Thus, lions in cages were raised to the arena. At the same time - up to 100 lions found themselves in the arena. The block system worked in such a way that the cells opened when they were at the right level. Archaeologists spent several years reconstructing one of the elevators and releasing the symbol of Rome - the she-wolf. The system worked on human strength. Similar elevators were found in other ancient structures, sometimes animals were used as lifting force.
Ivan Kulibin on the orders of Catherine II in the 1790s built a screw elevator instead of a winch. The base of the armchair was fastened to the long axis-screw, and the servants lifted the empress to the necessary floor of the Winter Palace. 50 years earlier, the palace of Louis XV was equipped with a winch lift. But one thing is to raise a chair or a platform for several floors, and quite another is to make such a system safe and secure, and also accessible not only to kings.
Elisha Graves Otis was born in 1811. He tried to do business, worked as a mechanic in a bed factory, and besides this he patented a “catcher”. His system made it possible to hold a load when a cable or rope was broken when people or equipment were lifted to the upper floors of buildings. Otis was able to effectively present the invention to the general public: he was on the platform at the moment when his assistant cut the rope with his sword. The platform did not fall down thanks to the catcher. A few years after the inventor's death, his sons opened Otis and in 6 years installed more than 2,000 elevators in US offices and hotels. In 1878, the first Otis passenger hydraulic elevator appeared, and in 1889 an electrically operated elevator.
Hydraulic elevators implied the presence of an underground mine filled with water, the height of the house itself. The piston in the shaft of the cylinder under the pressure of water pushed the cab up. Later the elevator was improved by placing the cylinder horizontally. Elevators on hydraulic pumps were installed on the Eiffel Tower . To lift passengers up to 175 meters from the Earth, two hydraulic elevators were needed at once - the cabs served as a counterweight to each other. Halfway had to do a transplant. Such elevators could not work in the winter, and they were replaced with electric ones.
Initially, hydraulic elevators moved much faster than electric and steam options, but they were harder to install. It was the elevators with electric drive and safety systems that allowed skyscrapers to grow upwards. Today, the fastest elevators are installed in the Taipei 101 tower in the capital of Taiwan, they move at a speed of more than 60 kilometers per hour, lifting people from the fifth to the eighty-ninth floor in 39 seconds.
Among the criteria that determine whether a building is a skyscraper, now there is a height, the presence of a steel frame and the purpose of a particular structure. The 10-storey building insurance house in Chicago is considered the first skyscraper: its height is 42 meters, which at that time was a good result, it is designed to accommodate offices, and the steel frame is used in the construction. It was built in 1885.
The idea of ​​the framework suggested by the architect William Le Baron Jenny , "the father of skyscrapers." Usually the role of the supporting structure was performed by external walls. The use of steel, which is many times stronger than concrete or brickwork, has reduced the total weight of the structure.
In the building of house insurance, they did not completely abandon the supporting walls. A few years later, the supporting frame was used in the construction of the Wenwright storey tower .
It should be said that in 1870, before the construction of the above-mentioned skyscrapers, a 40-meter office building of the Equitable Life Building was built in New York. Sometimes it is called the first skyscraper - only because of the frame, it does not fall into the general classification. It was the first office building with passenger elevators - hydraulic models from Otis' company.
Equitable Life Building
The criterion for the presence of the steel frame is no longer absolutely necessary. In 1998, in the capital of Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur, they built two 88-storey skyscrapers connected by a bridge on ball bearings. For the construction used elastic concrete, reinforced with quartz and comparable in strength to steel. But the mass of a skyscraper is twice that of buildings of similar size. The height of the buildings is 451 meters, including the spire.
Moreover, the tallest building in the world is not built on a steel frame. For the construction of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the United Arab Emirates, also used specially designed concrete that can withstand temperatures up to 48 degrees Celsius. Concrete was laid at night, adding ice to the solution.
The same company that built one of the Petronas Towers - Samsung - built the tower of Burj Khalifa.
Petronas Towers, Malaysia
Tom Cruise on Burj Khalifa, Dubai, UAE
Burj Khalifa
Overcoming obstacles
In 1912, in Moscow, they built a “techerez” - the House of cheap apartments Nirnsee with a height of over 40 meters. In 1908, the highest civilian building in the city was the 78-meter Telephone Station in Milyutinsky Lane. But the flight of engineering in Russia was artificially restrained by aesthetic and religious considerations - these tall buildings were lower than the Ivan the Great Bell Tower. All changed the "Stalin sisters."
If we talk about the United States, the builders had some other problems, such as imperfect elevators and pumps, which did not allow raising water to the highest floors. These tasks were soon dealt with, but with the growth of buildings, new challenges arose.
In the United States in the years 1913-1915 built a 40-storey Equitable Building . The 164-meter-high skyscraper cast such a shadow on the city that at midday it deprived of sunlight the houses on an area of ​​30 thousand square meters. To avoid such problems in the future, in New York, a law was passed, according to which the building was to be raised with ledges. So there were skyscrapers with a contoured shape.
Manhattan, 1932. Results of the Law on Zoning
The higher the building - the more it is influenced by natural conditions. The height of Taipei 101 in the capital of Taiwan is more than half a kilometer. Typhoons and earthquakes are characteristic of Southeast Asia. The tower has already withstood several earthquakes and stands quietly with any gusts of wind. Moreover, the people in this tower do not suffer from "air sickness", they do not feel pitching at high altitude.
The danger of collapse reduces the ball-pendulum, installed between 87 and 91 floors of the 101-storey building. The ball weighs 660 tons and allows you to compensate for gusts of wind. And the frame of the building is very durable, but not rigid, so it cannot simply “break”.
Taipei 101, Taiwan
Each high-rise building is a new challenge. The Shanghai Tower has a twisted structure to fight the wind and a double shell to maintain temperature. The platform for the Petronas towers had to be moved 60 meters to allow the twins to stand on the same type of soil, and the material for them needed to be produced exclusively in Malaysia - therefore a special sort of concrete was created for them.
Of the complex Russian projects, a skyscraper on the Red Gate Square should be noted. Under one of the buildings of the 138-meter high-rise building is located the lobby of the metro, which was built simultaneously with the house. For some time, the “turtles” would have to be tilted at the edge of the pit, and after the precipitation of the soil, he would necessarily bend over. To avoid this, the building was built with a slope, and the soil was frozen according to the technology used in the construction of the metro. The ground melted, the building sagged and fell strictly (almost) vertically. The task was so difficult to miscalculate that a similar method was not used anywhere else.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/402433/
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