Building For The Future

Why Aren't We All Building Bomb Shelters?

Elaine Meinel Supkis

Just this week, I have reported about rich Israelis building nuclear bomb shelters. And the USA suddenly announces they are closing the NORAD nuclear war room in Colorado yet we have all our fleet off shore by Iran because we fear nuclear war? Time to review why our leaders have extended their nuclear bomb shelters in DC while telegraphing to the rest of us, there is nothing to worry about except we should be scared to death or else?

This is a very odd time for the military and our ruler, Bush, to be talking so glibly about the lack of threat of nuclear war.

CHEYENNE MOUNTAIN AIR FORCE STATION, Colorado (AP) -- Dr. Strangelove would have a heart attack: America's vaunted underground war room deep inside this granite mountain is being retired. Not only that, but Russian military men have been inside the place.

During the long nuclear standoff with Moscow, the nation's super-secret nerve center was a symbol of both Cold War might and apocalyptic dread, depicted in such movies as "WarGames" in 1983.

But with the end of the Cold War, the war room is being put on "warm standby" to save money. A staff will keep it ready to resume operations at a moment's notice if a blast-hardened command center becomes necessary, but the critical work is being shifted to Peterson Air Force Base, about 10 miles away.

Seriously, since 9/11, they have been bellowing at us about Saddam who had no WMD what so ever, was going to nuke us and 'we don't want to find out when a nuclear bomb flashes' was used to terrorize the USA citizens into supporting the now disasterous war in Iraq. We used up every ounce of our diplomatic capital trying to twist arms of many nations that really couldn't believe what they were hearing and even today, we are going about the planet madly twisting arms, screaming about nuclear war and the need to disarm small, nearly helpless nations.

So aside from the obvious need to scare red state voters into voting for sexual predators, the only bomb shelters I see the GOP talking about is the bedroom: the nuclear bomb is two gay guys getting hitched.

The Japanese are understandably leery of being nuked, of course. But even there, I don't see in the news, stories explaining how they must build many nuclear bomb shelters! So whatever fear there is, it isn't translating into action.

Despite all the terror and fear pervading our poliltical realm, it is all psychological and none of it real, not like it was in my childhood. Here is a government guide from the late 1950's. Note the technical information which is useful only if one is in a suburb, not a city center.

#5 - SHELTER

The principles of radiation protection are simple - with many options and resources families can use to prepare or improvise a very effective shelter. You must throw off the self-defeating myths of nuclear un-survivability that may needlessly seal the fate of less informed families.

*snip*

What stops radiation, and thus shields your family, is simply putting mass between them and the radiation source. Like police body armor stopping bullets, mass stops (absorbs) radiation. The thicker the mass, the more radiation it stops. Also, the denser (heavier) the mass used, the more effective it is with every inch more you add to your fallout shelter. The thickness in inches needed to cut the radiation down to only 1/10th of its initial intensity for different common materials is: Steel 3.3", concrete 11", earth 16", water 24", wood 38", etc. The thickness required to stop 99% of the radiation is: 5" of steel, 16" of solid brick or hollow concrete blocks filled with mortar or sand, 2 feet of packed earth or 3 feet if loose, 3 feet of water. You may not have enough steel available, but anything you do have will have mass and can be used to add to your shielding - it just takes more thickness of lighter wood, for example, than heavier earth, to absorb and stop the same amount of radiation. Increasing the distance between your family and the radiation outside also reduces the radiation intensity.

All this information assumes one's house isn't set on fire or is blown flat so one can't get out of a basement. Not that many houses outside of the fussy Northeast has anything resembling a basement at all.

In this side view, it shows the lucky survivor huddling under the table, barricaded inside. The house is suspiciously intact overhead so it must be someone about 100 miles away from ground zero.

The government advice is to stay huddled under the table for merely two or three days (um, right). From the end of WWII to the Cuban Missile Crisis, Americans were exhorted to prepare for any sudden nuclear war and many bulletins, movies, school exercises and civil defense drills were encouraged.

Click here to view a film that was made for us kids back then, 'Duck and Cover.' I lived at various times, especially when in Tucson, Arizona, at some pretty big ground zero first targets if the Soviet Union wanted nuclear war. This meant we were exposed to a lot of civil defense training that I found laughable and annoying because it caused nightmares. One of the curiosities of my youth was people I knew including wretched family members who made various bomb shelters in the Rincon mountains, for example, and then kept it secret from their own brothers or sisters.

Whoopee. Try surviving on one's own! Yup. It really puzzled me because I have high survival skills and of all female side of the family, I had the best shooting and sword combat skills not to mention, archery. One would think I would either be welcome or they would have to worry about me hunting them down so I could pig out on the food they hoarded?

Well, it led to such forms of madness as this. Many, many 'survivalists' were worried about sharing their shelters and their goodies (from people like me, I suppose) and so they thought, if they hid everything, no one would beg them for help if a nuclear war broke out. Snug in one's spider hole, one could laugh it up while cousin Eddie turned to cinder or rolled on the ground, screaming and ripping off his burning clothes. Yup.

In a nutshell, this is what our society is devolving into: people praying to Jesus to fry one's sister to death because she loves Pegasus and not some creepy death god. And millions of Americans pray for nuclear war.

Which takes me back to the bizarre headlines: why is the government telling the men and women protecting America (HAHAHA---like on 9/11) there is really no danger and they can relax and stand down? Like when Bush got the memo, 'Bin Laden Determined To Attack in USA', Bush stayed on vacation and even while under attack, he and Rummy didn't show even slight energy or interest.

The legions of Christians praying for nuclear war aren't getting ready for it because a certain insanity has entered our public domain and looking at the 'Duck and Cover' movie shows the roots of this insanity. It is assumed the children and adults would assist each other but they all had to be super-paranoid that a nuke was going to hit at any time! I could see as clear as day that if there was a nuke dropped on Tucson, if I had no gun or other weapon at hand, I would be killed...by my neighbors, my own family, anyone scared that I would eat their food or drink their stored water.

So a brutal rush to eliminate fellow citizens and family members would be the result, not kindly men assisting school children into group shelters. This Cowardly New World really disturbed me as a child. It didn't make me very happy, actually. Indeed, it pissed me off so much, I became an advocate for disarming all nukes so I wouldn't have to worry about shooting my own sisters dead if we had to see who gets the bomb shelter's supplies.

Actually, an amazing number of people ignored all this. They chose to live in fantasyland and even when my father was flying in and out of DC while advising President Kennedy or President Eisenhower on whether or not to launch nukes, most of my playmates were blissfully clueless because our government kept their families ignorant of the real danger.

Indeed, I was supposed to play dumb with them because otherwise they might try to sneak into our bomb shelter, too and we would have to kill them. Back to that dark, antisocial core of Shadowlands. My father grew very angry with me during the sixties as I fought our government over these issues. He felt these bombs protected America even as our family didn't really want to save anyone. Namely, no one in the government was telling the truth about nuclear war even as they gamed the system for themselves.

It is worse today for we are supposed to support gamesmanship that is quite nuclear warish while at the same time our leaders are frantically building bomb shelters or distant hide-a-ways like in Paraguay and they are telling us to redecorate the kitchen and go to Disney World.

Click here to see a harrowing Japanese cartoon written by a survivor of Hiroshima: Hadashi no Gen The Japanese are actually quite fatalistic about destruction. This is a common thread that runs through their culture now and it expresses itself in a thousand ways. I have seen not only Tokyo but the entire solar system, nay all the universe, destroyed in artful ways in Japanese films and anime. If anything, they are more pessimistic now than at any time in their culture.

This is bad, for they are the likely first target in any war scenario. Today, China has managed to lure North Korea back into the stalled six party talks. China knows the USA will torpedo anything China offers and so they are prepared to illustrate to all of Asia, the USA is a rogue state that must be shunned. We think the negotiations will occur because everyone is mad at North Korea.

This is false.

Which takes me back to the curious news that we don't need to protect NORAD anymore. Now, NORAD sits in a building even more vulnerable than the Pentagon which was attacked by a mere passenger plane! Does this make any sense at all?

Here is a map of Colorado put out by FEMA showing where most nukes will fall.

Um, looks like the new location for NORAD is going to go 'poof'. Of course, the Pentagon claims they will rush to their old bomb shelter if they must. But again, on 9/11, they didn't even walk, much less, rush, to anything. They sat there, dumbfounded! For over an hour!

And everyone who runs nuclear war games (Russia and China) saw clearly how motivated and protective our military really is, which is, barely at all. Snoring away like just as the attack on Pearl Harbor. Sitting ducks. Quack.

Midway, this clip shows actual victims of the nuclear bomb attack. The actual footage of the victims of our nuclear bomb that destroyed Hiroshima clearly shows people stunned by the attack, everything utterly destroyed and little children wailing in pain, dying, women clutching each other, trying to struggle forwards, everything breaking down yet families trying to cling to each other, little children desperately carrying even younger siblings out of danger.

Heartbreaking. And seldom seen in America. We don't want to know the grim reality of nuclear war because, frankly, we like the notion of bombing people until they surrender!

The government lied to the people we conquered in the Midway Islands and they let us nuke their homes, thinking they could return home soon after and it would be only one bomb, anyway.

FROELICH: Benjamin's family is originally from the Marshall Island's Bikini Atoll, where in 1954 the United States conducted its biggest test, a 15-megaton hydrogen bomb. The operation, code-named Bravo, was one of many detonated on Bikini, as well as Enewetak Atoll. The explosion was equivalent to a thousand Hiroshima-sized bombs, and pulverized large portions of coral reef, irradiating the land and sea.

The U.S. Navy, along with Atomic Energy Commission personnel, evacuated people, including Benjamin's family, from test sites like Bikini before the tests. They were allowed to go back twenty years later. But then it was determined that drinking water on Bikini was still too radioactive, so, six years after that, islanders had to leave once again. In the meantime, some may have received a dose.

BENJAMIN: Right now, I have a lot aunties, and also uncles, they died. They had the sicknesses with them until their body cannot fight it anymore. I got two this year, they passed away. My sister also passed away last year because of cancers.

FROELICH: The testing continued for more than a decade. Islanders on nearby atolls often were not evacuated during the tests. They were deemed to be at a safe distance.

Our military bombed those islands over and over again and the people are still paying for this not to mention, all of us. The whole planet is seeing a huge hike in cancers thanks to all the nuclear bombs dropped during the Cold War and by far, most of these bombs were American.

The Islanders have been suing for a long time and the NYT has covered this issue but it isn't very important to the average American.

PACIFIC ISLANDERS SUE THE U.S. FOR $500 MILLION

By ROBERT TRUMBULL, SPECIAL TO THE NEW YORK TIMES
The residents of Enewetak atoll in the Marshall Islands have filed a lawsuit against the Federal Government for $500 million in damages, accusing the United States of neglect and broken promises after they were evacuated from their homeland in 1947 so that it could be used for a long series of nuclear weapons tests, In the complaint, entered in the United States Claims Court in Washington, the Enewetakese say that when they returned to their property two years ago they found that five of the atoll's 40 or so islets had been completely destroyed, among other lasting damage. Several other islands on which they once lived have been put off limits by United States scientists because of lingering radioactivity in the soil. The major island of Runit has been converted into a repository for contaminated debris from the tests and covered with a concrete cap 370 feet in diameter and 18 inches thick. The scientists say the debris will be radioactive for at least the next 240,000 years, according to the complaint.
October 17, 1982

To this day, many Americans have a pretty brutal attitude about Hiroshima. They have been fooled into thinking victory at this price, is well worth it. For us to be secure, we should feel free to nuke civilian populations. This ethos conflicts with our own rage when our own civilians are attacked. The dual justice whereby we can use whatever tools of power we wish while others must hold back or be disarmed, lies at the core of our present troubles. Namely, no one is taking us seriously except insofar we are acting insane and they fear we might unleash terrible weapons upon the Iraqis or Iranians, for example.

Russia, for example, doesn't see the mushroom clouds that the USA is yelling about.

MOSCOW, Oct. 31 (Xinhua) -- Russia has no information indicating Iran's nuclear program is for military purposes but Tehran should act quickly to clarify lingering questions about its nuclear work, a top official said on Tuesday.

And China calls for retraint and also warns us to not arm Taiwan.

BEIJING, Oct. 31 (Xinhua) -- China holds that all parties concerned should refrain from taking any action that may lead to the escalation of the situation on Iran nuclear issue, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said here Tuesday.

Liu said some new situation emerged in Iran nuclear issue, and China will continue to consult with other members of UN Security Council on relevant issues.

This is why Russia and China have loudly warned us to not do this. Tension between the world's Great Powers isn't peaceful at all, it is very dangerously elevated this year. So...why are they taking NORAD out of their secure location? Hmmm?

Culture of Life News Main Page

Part II of the Madness of Builders

Elaine Meinel Supkis

Part II of the Madness of Builders: Der Ring Die Nibelungen is the perfect metaphor for the Autumn days of the once mighty American Empire. It shows us how the New World Order won't be us in charge but rather, an overthrowing of the present system.

This epic opera remains to this day, a giant edifice within the world of opera. It, like the storyline’s protaganist, Wotan, is over ambitious and willfully powerful and like within itself, the hubris that brings destruction down upon Valhalla and Wotan mirrored the same forces that destroyed Hitler and Germany.

HItler loved this opera above all others. The Wagner family had this opera performed at Bayrueth at frequent intervals. This town’s main business was to host Wagner’s operas every summer. Wagner’s second wife, a woman very much like Frika, Wotan’s imperious wife in the opera, hosted parties for Hitler and was an ardent anti-semite like her husband.

The opera opens with the cavorting Rhine maidens teasing a rapacious dwarf, Alberich. They are guardians of the Rhinegold, the magic of sex and power. This power flows from the sun and from internal energy produced by organic matter as well as water flowing. Tying this together is sexual energy.

The dwarf, in retaliation to the relentless playful teasing of the Rhine Maidens, steals this power and turns the raw energy into a system that gives power to whoever holds it. The potent power of energy harnessed by machines made from material dug out of the earth is the underlying force in this interesting opera.The potent power overwhelms the mind of the dwarf wielding it and he becomes brutal and oppressive as he protects himself emotionally by abusing the wealth this energy showers upon him. In Norse mythology, he uses this power to seduce the goddesses as well as queens who prostitute themselves to him for a share of this wealth and power.

Wotan knows his life isn’t eternal but to protect himself and his family of gods, he decides to build Valhalla, a major construction project that only the Giants can do. To pay for the Giants, he needs funds and to get these funds, he needs to steal it from the dwarf.

Using trickery, he succeeds. The dwarf curses him and the Ring of Power. After this point, all the tricks and strategems of Wotan only make things worse and worse as he struggles to reconcile his original crime with his desire for total security and eternal life.

It ends when his daughter, Brünnhilda, explains everything and then throws herself, the Ring of Power and her dead lover on a funeral pyre and destroys not just these things but sets all of Valhalla on fire, destroying Wotan and everything he built.

The Zeitgeist of Germany when this opera was written was very upbeat. Under the astute leadership of Bismark, one of history’s infrequent geniuses in statecraft and war, the Second Empire was built on the fractured ruins of the previous Holy Roman Empire that rotted and collapsed in the religious fratricidal wars that wracked Europe from 1500 onwards. New flags flapped in the wind and the wind was blowing for Germany. Brimming with the released energy of the German people who suddenly saw all barriers collapse and a new sense of nationalism and unity swept the populace, all the fruits of the Romantic Movement were suddenly concentrated in Germany.

The new empire swept into war and overthrew the French Empire, forcing the heir of Napoleon to flee. As Germany strengthened its own state, France had another revolution and reaction which made France look weaker than Germany. The mature British Empire was the only power standing in the way of Germany’s expansion.

In this heady mix, Wagner wrote an opera that clearly showed the dire results of all this. Precient and unprecedented, it dared to show not just the end of power in Germany but nuclear war. The power elite as well as the dwarves and giants on earth, were swept away in a massive fire/flood. This dark vision of the future was hidden by the garb of Dark Age mythology. But the story makes it clear: the hubris of the ruling elites desiring total security and complete power dooms them to destruction for their own actions insure their own defeats.

All great powers that try to freeze everything in place end up conspiring to commit crimes, murder and mayhem in this Quixotic quest and thus, create what they fear.

Germantic romantic culture has spread throughout our own culture for it is very compelling as well as frightful. Just like the rich burden of Italian culture or French sensibilities overwhelms anyone who tries to digest it all, these powerful forces shape our view of the universe quite literally in Einstein’s case, all the stuff flowing from the former Holy Roman Empire still troubles our sleep and lures us into the same traps that caught Wotan so totally.

The Ring cycle is today by far the most influential opera on stage. Many opera houses count on Wagner Ring cycles for making money in summer just as the Nutcracker Ballet makes money in winter. This mirrors today’s Zeitgeist in America and Europe: a desire to steal energy and live in Valhalla while forcing the Giants and Dwarves, China and all the third world workers and peasants, to toil for us as we sit on our side of the Rainbow Bridge, having sex, eating and drinking merrily. This plan has flaws for the Dwarves are actively fighting back and the Giants are nearly done with their labors and will soon ask for us to honor our IOUs we have handed them as if there is no tomorrow.

Using the power of the Giants and Dwarves, we have built many palaces and giant towers. The biggest industry in America now is selling the labor of the Giants in the form of industrial goods produced in Asia and exploiting the Dwarves, illegal aliens, making them build our McValhallas for a pittance. Like in the Wagner opera, we mainly produce death equipment as our sole industry is now military stuff. To pay for this stuff, we sell weapons all over the planet and then we wail with fear as the world becomes more and more dangerous.

Right after paying the Giants and watching one Giant kill his brother over the Ring, Wotan discovers this great tower, this great fortress is not secure at all.

LOGE

What can equal
your luck, Wotan?
Great your gain
when you won the ring;
still more it profits (benefits) you
now that it is taken(as payment);
for see, your foes
fell (fighting) each other
for the gold that you gave up.

WOTAN

Yet how anxiety weighs upon me!
Dread and fear
are a ball and chain in my mind;
how to end it
Erda must teach me:
I must go down to her (and have sex).

Like in the operas, the Giants fight and then the winner becomes a dragon, Fafnir. This dragon can only be slain by a pure hero but this same person is directly responsible for destroying everyone including himself because he is rash and stupid.

China is aware of the dangers of rash stupidity and they are very wary about Bush and his pseudo-heroism and the American people have followed this coward pretending to be Siegfried and thus, ended up being defeated by tribes of dwarves, the barely armed people in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The dwarf in North Korea was smarter than the other dwarves and has armed himself with a small Ring of Power but it is enough to protect himself from the crazed American AWOL false Siegfried. Siegfried likes to talk about ‘victory’ all the time just like Hitler but victory is eluding him because he has no personal power, he is a feeble shell of a man.

The Dragon curls around the dwarf in North Korea and protects him but it can also crush him if he gives it too much annoyance. The Dragon knows that Siegfried and his Pentagon pals plan to kill it and it is taking many measures to prevent this crime. But all its efforts will be for naught if the rash fake hero feels he has to do the deed. This is why he works so frantically on building Valhalla America: a fortress that is unassailable.

Except it isn’t. And like the operatic painted backdrops lit up like fire as the music thunderously destroys it all, so will America fall to the thunder of thousands of nuclear bombs if we try and fail to take down the Dragon.

Like Germany before WWI and WWII, America is filled with fatalists who think it would be a good thing to have a final confrontation that will seperate the goats and the sheep, the dwarves and giants defeated while the hero dies and all lies in ruins, to be reborn as a New World Order wherein only the innocent and the good remain.

In the opera, it is the cheeky, laughing, sexually active females who are irresponsible and careless who survive.

Here is Bush, trying to save us with 'Valkyrie' that will ride to the battlefield from the very heavens.

By Marc Kaufman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 18, 2006; Page A01

President Bush has signed a new National Space Policy that rejects future arms-control agreements that might limit U.S. flexibility in space and asserts a right to deny access to space to anyone "hostile to U.S. interests."

The document, the first full revision of overall space policy in 10 years, emphasizes security issues, encourages private enterprise in space, and characterizes the role of U.S. space diplomacy largely in terms of persuading other nations to support U.S. policy.

When writing about all this, one can't help but notice how the grandest of all space operas, the Star Wars epic, is similiar to and based on the Ring of the Nibelungen. And it, too, senses something is very wrong with our future plans for a Valhallian power, our plans for the Dwarves and Giants of the Earth. Lucas doesn't have the depth of Wagner to see the logical conclusion, he has a happy, Nüremberg Rally ending to his saga.

But as time passed and Lucas aged, he fell more and more into the same spell that captured Wagner's mind. His last film was totally dark and the logic of the earlier movies fades in the face of the Dark Force triumphant for the entire culture is dark in the Revenge of the Sith.

The Valkyrie are Yoda and his clique of warriors and Sieglinde is Darth Vader's illicit wife who also bears fatal twins who are doomed to destroy their father. All this was washed out of the Return of the Jedi. I greatly dislike that movie because it isn't serious like the second Star Wars movie that has the true glimpse of the utter despair of the last movie in this long series.

Culture of Life News Main Page

Part I of the Madness of Builders

Elaine Meinel Supkis

‘Post-modern’ architecture is even worse than ‘modern’ architecture and both are dehumanizing as well as downright dangerous as we saw on 9/11, for example. The invention of elevators as well as other modern building materials has tempted designers to create increasingly bad or dangerous buildings all in the name of hubris.

The Guardian has an interesting article about how all the buildings that have won awards for daring design end up being hard to use, inhuman or hard to maintain if not downright dangerous.

Winners of the prestigious Stirling prize for architecture, which will be announced tonight, have been lauded by architects but are often beset by faults and loathed by the people who use them, according to one of the government's design advisers.

Last year the judges were widely criticised for selecting the controversial new Scottish parliament building for the top prize in the face of a catalogue of problems that dogged its construction and forced it to go 10 times over budget.

Problems have also occurred at Peckham library, in south London, the winner in 2000. Librarians complain of dinginess inside and the fact that older people are put off from entering because it is on the fourth floor.

Many of the other buildings to scoop the prize have failed to live up to the praise heaped on them. Critics say architects have become detached from everyday life and are calling for a rethink of the prize so that buildings are judged on how well they stand up to use.

Irena Bauman, a Leeds-based architect and one of the government's design advisers, said architects had become seduced by style over substance.

"Even iconic buildings, as Stirling buildings undoubtedly are, suffer from a host of minor defects which is forgivable. However, some of them are inadequate for their purpose. This is embarrassing in buildings receiving the highest architectural accolade in the UK."

Defects? When someone sets out to build something, the chief thing to avoid is any ‘defects.’ The more defects there are, the more a building becomes a danger, a fiscal sink due to excessive repairs and of course, a nightmare to use. Flaws in building design can be fatal. Some designs are made to fail. The most spectacular failure in the history of architecture is the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings.

Modern architecture is suffering from the same cultural euni that afflicts other fine arts. The building of museums leads the pack in crazed, inefficient, impossible to keep in repair buildings. Completely cut off from reality, the architect simply puts together a hodge-podge of planes and inclines and a wild variety of building materials, many of which must be replaced every 20 years or so, and sets everything out of whack so there are few verticals at 90 degrees giving a giddy, irrational explosion. Like the much celebrated and I think, totally irresponsible Getty Museum.

Designed by the North American architect Frank O. Gehry, this unique Museum built on a 32,500 square meter site in the center of Bilbao represents an amazing construction feat. On one side it runs down to the waterside of the Nervión River, 16 meters below the level of the rest of the city of Bilbao. One end is pierced through by the huge Puente de La Salve, one of the main access routes into the city.

As someone who fixes building flaws, it distresses me to see so many ill-concieved projects dominating the news and encouraging even more capricious, bizarre, useless expressions of distain for the laws of physics.

This arrogance is part of the race across the globe to build the biggest building. Instead of organically growing, powerful people want monuments to their hubris and the present rash of building basically useless structures that are too big is a symptom of a disease.

In today's news, a story of the latest foolish project to erect a target for ambitious terrorists who have many reasons to destroy it.

by Christian Chaise Mon Oct 30, 10:46 AM ET
DUBAI (AFP) - Slated to become the world's tallest skyscraper and symbol of a city given to grandiose projects, "Burj Dubai," or Dubai Tower, is rising in parallel with the profits of its promoter, Emaar Properties.

With two stories added every week, Burj Dubai is taking shape as the centerpiece of a 20-billion-dollar venture featuring the construction of a new district, "Downtown Burj Dubai," that will house 30,000 apartments and the world's largest shopping mall.

Launched in early 2004, the construction of the tower by South Korea's Samsung should be completed at the end of 2008 and cost one billion dollars, according to Greg Sang, the Emaar official in charge of Burj Dubai.

Unlike Manhattan, there is no logic in building this thing. In Manhattan, there was never really good logic for the WTC, either. The builders and the rich men directing them said quite openly, they wanted something overwhelmingly big and controversial. Right smack in the center of where wars are brewing like coffee at sunrise.

The World Trade Center was concieved by Rockefeller in New York. Along with flattening the Victorian brownnstone neighborhood in Albany to build a neo-Mayan temple to State Power, he wanted to put up the world’s biggest building in lower Manhattan. The World Trade Center still holds the record for square footage. Here is a description of the designing and building of the malformed WTC complex:

"After studying more than one hundred schemes in model form, Yamasaki decided on a two-tower development to contain the nine million square feet of office space. One tower became unreasonable in size and unwieldy structurally, yet several towers became too approximate for their size and 'looked too much like a housing project'; whereas two towers gave a reasonable office area on each floor, took advantage of the magnificent views, and allowed a manageable structural system. The twin towers, with 110 floors rising 1,353 feet, ... (are) the tallest in the world. From observation decks at the top of the towers it...(is) possible to see 45 miles in every direction....One distinct advantage of the project's enormity is the architectural opportunity to advance the art of building. Yamasaki re-examined the skyscraper from the first principles, considering no ground so hallowed that it could not be questioned, especially in view of the potential of modern technology. The usual economic prohibition on 'custom-made' was out, as virtually anything made for the Center would automatically become a stock item. 'Economy is not in the sparseness of materials that we use,' said Yamasaki of his $350 million estimated cost, 'but in the advancement of technology, which is the real challenge.'

"The structural system, deriving from the I.B.M. Building in Seattle, is impressively simple. The 208-foot wide facade is, in effect, a prefabricated steel lattice, with columns on 39-inch centers acting as wind bracing to resist all overturning forces; the central core takes only the gravity loads of the building. A very light, economical structure results by keeping the wind bracing in the most efficient place, the outside surface of the building, thus not transferring the forces through the floor membrane to the core, as in most curtain-wall structures. Office spaces will have no interior columns. In the upper floors there is as much as 40,000 square feet of office space per floor. The floor construction is of prefabricated trussed steel, only 33 inches in depth, that spans the full 60 feet to the core, and also acts as a diaphragm to stiffen the outside wall against lateral buckling forces from wind-load pressures.

Gross area of 43200 square feet (4020 square meters) each per floor.

The tremendous weight of all that concrete, steel and glass was vividly displayed when the pilings supporting the outer skin of the building were severed on one side. The insupportable weight plus the raging fires caused the buildings to rapidly collapse. People who don’t know the buildings as intimately as I do, can’t understand the gross size of the place.

Looking at films and photos are no subsitute for understanding the weight bearing loads resting on precious few steel members. In order to make the interior as open as possible, the building was designed with few interior supports that were weight bearing.

Comparing the size of each floor of the WTC with other buildings is like comparing a professonal sports stadium to a school football field. When the WTC was proposed by Rockefeller, an ambitious man, he wanted it to be the final word in mega-pyramid building. Lower Manhattan was flush with money with the stock market going up and up and up.

The giddy feelings this caused allowed people to ignore the blinking red lights. The Empire State Building, for a long time the tallest building in the world, was planned and launched just as the stockmarket hit its greatest highs. Like with the WTC, the Empire State Building was actually built after the market crashed and the potential tenants evaporated along with a massive amount of elusive wealth.

Like the WTC, the Empire State Building was featured in disaster and monster movies. The unease of t his building was mirrored by the WTC. For example, a military plane crashed into it. Suicides used it to the point, a huge fence had to be erected on the roof to protect people from their own despair.

The fact that it never collapsed was due to lack of interest in building risky structures. Namely, the rooms in the huge tower are small, the windows are a smaller proportion of the outer wall compared to the WTC which was mostly tall windows. So when a plane hit, it put a hole in one side but it couldn’t topple the structure which was knitted together very tightly following ancient building codes that evolved over thousands of years.

As I knew looking at the interior of the WTC back when it was still standing, there is no internal supports for most of the square footage.

According to Malott, before the advent of the World Trade Center towers, high-rise buildings shared two vital characteristics: one, they were supported by a grid of steel columns, and two, the columns were encased in a tough cladding of reinforced concrete. This concrete created a fireproof skin designed to withstand a four-hour inferno. (The four-hour rating is a building industry standard for fireproofing) As designed by architect Minoru Yamasaki the Twin Towers incorporated neither of these traditional features. These features were found in most tall buildings before the Twin Towers came along and changed the equation. Malott claims that it was the failure to use the traditional steel column grid design and concrete coating on the steel columns that was the fatal flaw of the buildings--not the initial crashes, not the exploding jet fuel and not the subsequent fire alone.

In an attempt to cut weight--which is the enemy of all high-rise buildings--the designers of the Towers eliminated the traditional steel column grid. Instead, Yamasaki placed the steel columns in the perimeter of the outer walls of the buildings and in the perimeter of the small inner core of the buildings that housed the elevator shafts. This design allowed every floor to have unobstructed floor space with no interior supporting columns or beams.

In further attempts to save weight, time and money designers were allowed to fireproof the steel columns with spray-on mineral-wool fiber and layers of sheetrock instead of the traditional method of using reinforced concrete. The elevator shaft and the steel columns in those shaft walls were covered with sheetrock as well.

Today, thanks to modern building materials, people think they can ignore the lessons of the past. The Mall built by Rockefeller in Albany, for example, ignored the climate, the landscape and anything human. So in winter, it is a wind tunnel just like the WTC was, walking around the WTC in winter with the wind screaming around the corners was dangerous. Everyone used the underground tunnels just like they do today in Albany.

I once had to hail a cab outside of Building #1 in winter and the door of the cab was nearly torn out of my hands. In summer, the plaza was very hot and in winter, very cold. Ditto Albany. The WTC, when it was finished, opened right in the middle of a stockmarket crash that kept the market in the doldrums for years. Getting tenants was nearly impossible. It was regarded as a white elephant.

The Empire State Building along with the Chrysler Building, depressed rents in Midtown for many years too as the landlords tried to fill these buildings with tenants. The Empire State Building had less trouble than the WTC because it was a prestigious address.

The WTC, due to its big size, was harder to fill because it swayed in the wind during storms and the big size was oppressive. The elevators were really big and if one worked near the top, going up and down in the express elevators was like flying the Space Shuttle, you could feel the weightlessness as it dropped and the pressure when it shot up.

Even as the rich rulers of New York strove to break all records with a giant tower complex, a major corporation decided to play this game of the gods, too. So right on the even of their own destruction, the Sears corporation poured much of their money in their own mega-tower.

However, Sears' optimistic growth projections never came to pass. Competition from its traditional rivals (like Montgomery Ward) continued, only to be surpassed in strength by other retailing giants like Kmart, Kohl's, and Wal-Mart. Sears, Roebuck deteriorated as market share slipped away, and management grew paranoid and introverted through the 1970s.[1] The Sears Tower was not the draw Sears hoped it would be to potential lessees, and stood half-vacant for a decade as more office space was built in the 1980s. Finally, Sears was forced to take out a mortgage on their headquarters building. Sears began moving its offices out of the Sears Tower in 1993 and had completely moved out by 1995, moving to a new office campus in Hoffman Estates, Illinois.

There have been several owners of the Sears Tower since then. The owners who purchased the tower in March 2004 were rumored to have plans to rename the building.

Considered one of the finest locations for business in Chicago, the Sears Tower is now a multi-tenant office building with more than 100 different companies doing business there, including major law firms, insurance companies and financial services firms.

The hubris, the mocking sense of power of the President and board of directors of Sears was broken by the very monument they sought to erect. This is very common. One can see when a culture or situation is at an apex because they build giant, inappropriate or even unusable buildings.

Virtually the same year the WTC opened its doors to virtually no tenants aside from government agencies, the City of New York went belly up and nearly went bankrupt and had to be saved from its own follies.

Here is a recent NYT article about a man in my old neighborhood in Brooklyn who built a hazardous structure because he wanted to make something bizarre.

By ROBIN POGREBIN
Published: October 18, 2006

It may be art to Arthur Wood, 75, who has lived in the Brooklyn building known as the Broken Angel for 27 years. But to the Department of Buildings, the hulking brick, wood and glass structure at 4 Downing Street in Clinton Hill is a glaring jumble of code violations, and yesterday it issued a formal order for him and his wife to vacate.

Liz O. Baylen for The New York Times

“I’m facing imminent eviction,” Mr. Wood, a self-taught architect and artist, said in a telephone interview. “This is Nazi tactics.”

The city’s Buildings Department inspected the four-story building on Thursday, two days after a fire in its rooftop addition. “Generally speaking, this building had numerous building-code violations that made it unfit to occupy,” said Jennifer Givner, a department spokeswoman.

After buying and moving in to the building, formerly the headquarters of the Brooklyn Trolley, in 1979, Mr. Wood gradually transformed it into a quirky piece of sculpture in and of itself, with an elaborate structure on top, partly exposed sides and intricate masonry. Marty Markowitz, the Brooklyn borough president, has described it as “a Rubik’s Cube of a spaceship.”

LIke the WTC, this structure became a hazard for firemen trying to put out a fire that should have never started in the first place. Irresponsible structures kill people. There are many examples of this principle at work. In France, a country where frantic, strange, dangerous structures are praised and encouraged, a lunatical architect built a pedestrian way at the airport that suddenly collapsed totally, killing innocent users.

I consider this sort of ‘architecture’ to be criminal and anyone daring to build dangerous things should be charged with murder if they kill people.

In another case, a contractor and an architect didn’t understand the weight-ratios of a load-bearing causeway and they installed these flying walkways made of cement and suspended them using bolts that didn’t connect with any steel structure within the cement walkways.

The Hyatt Regency hotel walkway collapse was a major disaster that occurred on July 17, 1981 in Kansas City, Missouri, killing 114 people and injuring more than 200 others during a tea dance.

I was in the hospital when this happened. I remember looking at the destruction and just seeing pictures, I knew what went wrong. This was infuriating because it was painfully wrong, the method used to secure the platforms.

Recently, in France, a high-tech, bizarre design terminal at the airport in Paris collapsed.

February 16, 2005

Both structural and design faults caused a large section of the newly constructed Terminal 2E at Paris' Charles de Gaulle airport to collapse last May, killing 4 people and injuring 3.

An investigative commission under the direction of Jean Berthier, engineering Professor at France's Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chausées, concluded that the building's structure had been fragile from the outset. It then progressively degraded under use - principally from the side walkways - to the point where the structure gave way.

Berthier's report pointed to four connected causes: 1) insufficient or badly positioned structural steel; 2) lack of mechanical "redundancy," in that the stresses were concentrated and could not be shifted to other structural components; 3) concrete beams that offered too little resistance to stress and use, and 4) the positioning of metal supports within the structural concrete.

This alarmed the Chinese who hired the same clowns to design stuff in China. Of course, the very fact it collapsed meant the designers should stand trial. There is no other way to stop madcap building that is not carefully crafted and thought out.

There is the arrogance of the tribe of financiers who are, like the infamous Donald Trump, building frantically across the globe as they colonize psychological frontiers, are similar in hubris as previous mad dashes for the extreme as an expression of faith and power. In ancient Egypt, there was a rash of pyramid building. Each one was bigger than before until the Great Pyramid of Cheops was erected.

Then the whole thing ended as the culture struggled to deal with the destructive side of such out of control expressions of power. In ancient Rome, every thing became gigantic. To this day, the huge aquaducts that lace the landscape of France and Italy still boggle the mind. In Rome itself, the building of mega-structures continued right up to the very end, the public baths and stadiums were the last buildings erected for nearly 500 years as the whole culture collapsed.

In Medieval Europe, after 1000 AD, the mad rush to build ever bigger and more elaborate cathedrals ended in a rush with the building of unsupportable giants which collapsed when the Nave or Crossing couldn’t support the weight over the span. Always, at the terminal end of a building boom, architects experiment with the impossible and people die.

The wild chase to build the biggest cathederals lead to some spectacular collapses.

Between 1307 and 1311 the central tower was raised to its present height.

Around 1370 to 1400 the western towers were heightened.

All three towers had spires until 1549 when the central tower's spire blew down.

The central tower rises to 83 m (271 feet) and remains the tallest cathedral tower in Europe without a spire. Prior to the collapse of the lead-encased wooden spire, with the spire, the Cathedral rose to a height of 160 m (525 feet), making it at the time the world's tallest building. It was the first building to exceed the height of the Great Pyramid of Giza. Until the collapse of the spire, the Cathedral remained the world's tallest structure for more than two centuries. Looking eastwards, the next highest point was the Ural Mountains in Russia.

By the end of the 13th Century, the spasm feeding the wild catheral building faded even as more and more structures fell apart too.

With growing assurance, architects in northern France, and soon all over Europe, competed in a race to conquer height. The vault of each new cathedral strained to surpass that of its predecessors by a few meters. The dramatic collapse in 1284 of the tallest among them, Beauvais, marked the vertical limits of Gothic architecture. Its choir and transept were rebuilt soon afterwards to the original 48 meters, now supported by twice as many flying buttresses.

The building of ever bigger Gothic cathederals ended with great suddeness: the Black Plague hit and Europe underwent a spasm of worker/peasant rebellions and dynastic battles that, coupled with the split in the Papacy, eroded support for ever-wilder projects.

Europe is dotted with cathederals that have only one or no completed towers, for example. Notre Dame is the most famous, normally, towers rise much higher than the church and have steepled roofs. Many churches shortend the Naves or left off the Choir. By 1500, many of the very expensive stained glass windows are vandalized during religous upheavals.

When the Empire State Building was finished, democracy in the world was collapsing under the weight of the Great Depression and empires were preparing to destroy each other’s cities and not only did all mega-building cease, there was terrific destruction. Hitler fancied himself as an architect and spent many hours toiling on a plan that Rockefeller mimicked here in New York with the Mall and the WTC, a huge complex of inhuman buildings that dwarfed mere people.

Almost none of the other buildings planned for Berlin was ever built. Berlin was to be reorganized along a central three-mile long avenue. At the north end, Speer planned to build an enormous domed building, the Volkshalle (people's hall), based on St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. The dome of the building would have been impractically large; it would be over seven hundred feet (200 meters) high and eight hundred feet (250 meters) in diameter, sixteen times larger than the dome of St. Peter's. At the southern end of the avenue would be an arch based on the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, but again, much larger; it would be almost four hundred feet (100 meters) high, and the Arc de Triomphe would have been able to fit inside its opening.

Even as the flames rose over Germany, he dreamed of building inappropriate stuff. The same is true of Stalin. “Stalinesque’ means ugly, dreary, poorly planned buildings that don’t work with real humans. This madman was focused on humiliating, torturing and then working to death or killing many populations just as if he were the dwarf, Alberich, in the Wagner operas. Just like Bush thinks he, too, is an all-conquering Siegfried, so did Hitler presume. He, like Bush, noted all the 'victories' on the battlefield while ignoring the harsh truth that every trimumph simply make his defeat more certain.

When this latest cycle of hyper-building is done, people will shake their heads as one ‘great’ structure after another is demoished because they are impossible to use, dangerous or hideously expensive to repair. The Mall in Albany had to be entirely rebuilt, the outside marble covering falling apart very dangerously, everything leaking, upheaving in the frost/thaw cycles, my husband’s health was permenantly damaged by Rockefeller’s buildings. He worked in one and thanks to the poor air circulation, he was harmed by chemicals and had to retire early.

I wish I could kick the architect where it really hurts.

Anyone offering awards for buildings must first consider the people who are doomed to use the places. If they have any defects that endanger lives, the architect should be removed and forbiddenn to build. And don’t even ask me how many people have died building all these big places.

Too many. Way too many. Even the WTC had a steady stream of dead before the first terrorist even dreamed of making things worse.

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