Like, a residential high-rise has hundreds of couches and refrigerators and bedroom sets inside. How can the building support all that weight? How does a powerful windstorm not knock the entire building over?
In: Engineering
The pillars/columns supports (and plenty more) are arranged with this idea (and plenty more!) in mind. I’m still getting over that the floors/ceilings are so strong.
Because buildings are made of steel and concrete, not paper. I don’t really know what you expected here.
It has to do a lot with the weight distribution. Buildings are made in such a way so that they can hold extra weights. Think of a card house and how weight distributes there. Same principle
Because we design them not to.
When we design buildings we ensure all the load is safely carried down to the ground below – so the floor joists are designed to be strong enough to support an appropriate load, then the walls and beams they sit on are designed to support them and so on all the way down the building.
This does mean that at the bottom of a multi storey building the walls and columns are carrying some pretty massive weights, so we just have to choose the appropriate materials and designs to support these.
As a point of reference, you can easily support four or more storeys worth of building on timber stud walls if you design them properly, and materials like concrete and steel can support far, far greater loads.
In terms of buildings toppling over in the wind? It is exactly the same – we make a point to design structures to resist these loads. We can figure out how strong we expect the wind to be in a location and what load there will be on the building, and design them to cope. This uses things like sheathing on timber walls to create racking (support) walls, diagonal bracing and more to withstand these loads and transfer them down to the ground safely.
When you get down to the ground, there is also the part of a structure you don’t see – the foundations. For a normal house this can be as simple as digging down to the more solid ground beneath the surface and pouring some concrete strips to build off of. In the case of skyscrapers this can mean things like piles – giant reinforced columns reaching deep into the ground below, so that when the wind blows the ground is able to act as a counterbalance and stop the building moving – imagine a seesaw stood up vertically with the pivot at ground level, only every time you (the wind) push down on your end, someone far bigger (the ground) just holds the opposite end in place.
And this is why engineers and architects can be paid big money on some projects – it takes a lot of training and certification to be able to properly design a structure in a safe and practical manner…
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