how are the weight on the first floor of a skyscraper able to hold the weight of over a 100 floors?
In: 570
The floors aren’t exactly holding the collective added weight of other floors, it’s all the support beams and foundation that support it.
But it blows my mind as well
Reinforced concrete is a mixture of heavy duty concrete poured into moulds containing a thick web of hardened steel rebar. The concrete itself is extremely hard and can hold heavy loads, the rebar is to keep the concrete stable and prevent cracks. Now some of these sky scrapers may have 50-60 main pillars that hold up the rest of the structure, balancing the load evenly to prevent over stressing the concrete. Lots of solid engineering and testing goes into the architecture and building materials used in each sky scraper.
They don’t. You just don’t see the pillars. The floors and the walls are just hooked into the pillars. So the walls and floors prevent the pillars from gaping open, and the pillars prevent the walls and floors from falling down.
Concrete and steel.
For one, the weight (or load) from
All above floors doesn’t go into the floor you stand on, it goes straight down the columns, so the floor directly under your feet is only supporting your load.
Then underneath the building all of those columns lead to some kind of concrete foundation, it might be one big slab, or a footing underneath every column, or maybe even long concrete piles (pillars) that go all the way down to bedrock.
Concrete is incredibly strong in compression, meaning it’s very very hard to make it break by crushing it, so it can support a lot of weight/load without issues.
The weight goes through the columns (external and internal) which are connected to the piles below the ground. They pretty much only go through compression (and not tension or bending) and materials such as steel and concrete are extremely strong in compression.
The floors themselves only have to hold what is on that floor itself, it’s people, furniture etc.
A building doesn’t just rest on the ground. For tall buildings, they drive enormous spikes (“piles”) deep into the ground. And lots of them. These are the things that make up the *foundation* and support the weight of the building.
Here’s a good youtube video with some additional detail:
A building is a lot like a tree. The lower branches of a tree don’t support the upper ones, the trunk does that. In a building instead of a trunk you have one or more concrete and steel columns surrounded by a steel frame. The floors are attached to those like branches on a tree. So the weight of the building is not supported by the floors, but by an combination of concrete and steel.
You could remove the exterior and interior walls of most skyscrapers and they would stay up just fine.
There are many huge load bearing pillars you don’t see…
The visible walls themselves don’t really hold up that much, it could stand without any walls
https://www.constrofacilitator.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/high-rise-buildings-1.jpg
Also remember – in most cases, a building with a basement weighs less than the material removed for the foundations.
One floor only carries the load that directly comes from that floor. The floor is supported by beams, which are connected to columns.
The columns are the elements that carry all cumulative loads that are above them. This is why columns are larger on lower floors, higher loads require more materials.
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