How is the first floor of a 100 story building able to hold all that weight?
In: Engineering
It doesn’t
The weight is taken by the steel framing you can’t see
The outside is just a weatherproof skin
The highest you can build where the next floor is directly supported by the floor below (stone or brick) is about 8-12 stories.
Edit:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monadnock_Building](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/monadnock_building)
Has 16 stories and the walls are 6 feet wide at the bottom
The floor doesn’t. The load goes straight through the columns. Each floor only adds its own load to the columns.
The columns in a 100 story building can hold all that weight because they’re huge and made out of very strong materials – high strength concrete, high strength reinforcement, and high strength steel.
Don’t think of it as the first floor holding the weight. The building has a skeleton, and each floor is “hung” on the supports of that skeleton individually. The core of the building is typically a grid of steel and concrete sitting on a concrete base underground, and is designed to distribute the total weight of the building evenly down to the foundation.
Think of it like a chest of drawers. The weight of the top drawer doesn’t sit on the weight of the drawer below it, it is being supported by the frame. You can open or even take the bottom drawer out without the other drawers falling down or being affected in any way.
Im more interested in how the second floor of a 100 story building able to hold all that weight
Just want to add thst believe it or not the weight isn’t even the largest force a tall building has to contend with. The horizontal forces experienced during high winds are actually stronger than the force of gravity acting on a building.
Skyscrapers have an internal steel skeletal structure that is handling all of the weight. Not the floor itself.
If you could go into the basement of any tall building you will see a lot of massive columns scattered throughout the floor. The weight of every floor above is being handled by the combined strength of the columns that basically run the entire height of the building.
At each floor steel beams are bolted to the main support columns and the weight of the floor is handled by those horizontal beams, so each floor has it’s own support structure that is tied to the main support columns.
The taller the building, the more vertical steel columns you need to handle and distribute the weight.
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