Oklahoma! Home to the Tallest Building in the States!

Putting a giant building up in tornado alley seems like a really bad idea to me.

Wouldn't be too worried about tornados, they're really good at engineering towers to withstand strong winds.

Is there a lot of demand for high rise office space in the middle of fucking nowhere? This is not a roller coaster where people have to ride the fucking thing in person. People are getting out of the office and they want to build the biggest one in a place no one wants to be? If people wanted to be in oklahoma there was cheap land and low living costs.

Who invested in this shit?

They could be builkding schools, they could be making high speed rail to bring people into and through the state. They could be buying hookers and blolw, but they want to build the world's biggest skyscraper dick in oklafuckinghoma.

Perhaps they need a monorail like shelbyville.

Oh sorry, it is only the biggest high rise dick in the US, not the world.

So it is not even a world attraction. Good idea.

We really need a playpen for the red states.

I’m not aware of any glass that can handle debris hitting it at 100+ MPH.

Make it out of the magic steel from "Atlas Shrugged".

What is it with oil money and vanity projects?

Or make it out of unobtanium which comes from Avatar Shrugged.

That is probably the plot for the fifth movie.

I mean, if it helps usher in density and transit and starts to help counteract the sprawl of OKC, I'll give them this one

plenty of types, from the "bullet proof" on vehicles to airplane windscreens (can hit a 5lb object at >350mph safely) to good old store windows and doors (we've all seen clips of some idiot trying to smash a window with a brick that proceeds to bounce back at him).

I'd be more concerned how the windows are held in weak aluminium frames attached by a couple of 2" screws to ballasts (usually metal studs) that may or may not be effectively mounted.

So what you're saying is you don't want Spirit Aviation to install these

no more than I'd want drywallers putting together an airplane...

I think I'd prefer them building a 737 MAX...

Each of those things come with their own limitations, however. The "bullet proof" automotive glass is several inches thick, and weighs a helluvalot. And the thing about tornados is that not only are they somewhat unpredictable, but they can hurl things like cars at high speed. Oh, and thanks to global warming, we're discovering that they can be more powerful than they used to be.

I should also mention that thanks to things like fracking, OKC is now an "earthquake zone." I dunno if the building codes in the area have been updated to reflect this fact, but the heavier a building is, the more likely it's going to have problems when a quake happens.

It's possible the small army of architects and engineers involved in planning a development like this have missed it, but my money is on them having asked what if it gets windy.

Yeah, I wouldn't be too sure about that.

Yeah, a famous example of why revisions to designs during construction need to be heavily scrutinized.

Also that certain factors weren't considered during the initial design process. Now, I want to point out that lots of government regulations got slashed while Trump was President and that OK is a red state, so they probably didn't have terribly stringent regulations to begin with, so if this thing gets built and it ends horribly in disaster after a tornado blows through the area, none of us should be surprised.

heh-I often say the same about the condo fields along Toronto's waterfront... they're all built on an infill from the late 19th century and there's the occasional fracking expedition in the lake. sooner or later they'll hit a fault line and domino the whole thing...

I get that tornadoes can toss around some very heavy stuff, but at that point you'd need a bunker, not a building. But let's keep the goalposts at the original "debris"

bulletproof glass actually starts at as little as 6mm and gets thicker with layers... again, we're talking debris, not a dump truck, hitting it at 100-150 mph. someone else can do th emath of foot pounds for how hard a 1 oz bullet travelling half a mile per second compared to a 10 pound chunk of something at 100mph...

for some comparison though, the CN Tower here (also near the lakeshore) has ridden out earthquakes in the 5s and not even been shaken from plumb (any more than the 6 or so inches it's always been out by)...

Oh, I have no doubt they'll factor in the environment, and our structural engineering capacities are really quite amazing.

The big question I have is where are they going to get the renters to pay for the square footage. That's the reason they don't make skyscrapers that often in big cities any more, cost.

Maybe as a one off in the plains it will attract more attention than just another skyscraper in the skyline, but it still seems like a pretty shaky proposition to me. And not due to high winds or fracking.

Yeah I give it 50% chance at best of getting up, but hotel and residential spaces do tend to do better in these vanity buildings.

I’m telling y’all this is all oil money and vanity.

These Oklahoma City high on oil bastards aren’t content with just stealing NBA teams from real cities who balk at spending half a billion of public money to build the CEO of Starbucks a new arena but need bigger and bigger vanity projects to show off their wealth and how they have ‘made it’.

Well yeah, welcome to the history of skyscrapers.

That's the neat thing about fracking though, you don't even have to hit a fault line to cause a quake. There's already a couple of places where they've had to ban fracking because it's caused small quakes in an area that's not designed to handle any.

Okay, but even if the only stuff picked up by a tornado and hurled at the building is small, that can still mean hundreds, if not thousands of objects hitting the building at high speed. And even if the worst bit of damage done to the building is a cracked window, that can be a huge problem to deal with on such a tall structure. Any building over 50 storeys has to be pressurized because otherwise the air gets a little too thin on the top floors if someone's there for long periods of time. (It's not a lot of extra pressurization like maybe a pound or two, but it's enough that it adds to the cost of construction.) Going to be a real PITA dealing with that shit.

However, that's a different style of building. I was in the WTC back in '87, and the buildings swayed in even mild winds. So much so, that when we were sitting in the restaurant on the top floor of the tower, we could watch our drinks swish around in our cups. It was designed to do that, of course, and many modern skyscrapers have massive weights in the top of them that are moved about to dampen the motion of the buildings. I don't know of any that are built in areas prone to tornados, though. And thanks to global warming, we're having to toss our predictions about things like once in a hundred years events out the window, because such events are becoming more common.

What.

Someone's been pulling your leg mate.

Sure, they can be, but this is America, and oftentimes we don't do certain sensible things unless we're required to do so by law. In NYC, if you want to put up a building over a certain height, you have to put a scale model of the building, along with the area where you're going to be putting the building, in a wind tunnel, and if the wind patterns are too disruptive (even if it wouldn't cause damage to the buildings), you've got to redesign the thing.

IIRC, it costs as much to build each floor above the 50th floor, as it does to build a building that's only 50 floors high. This is one of those vanity projects where someone says, "If you build it, they will come." and doesn't really think through everything. You know the Burj Khalifa? It seems that a bunch of the people who could afford the $55K/yr rent on their apartment, couldn't afford the $25K/yr service fees that they were also expected to pay. That story's about a decade old, but there's been all kinds of tales of how this or that thing has gone wrong with the place that nobody expected.

I doubt that OKC has the kind of strict building regs that a place like NYC does, and when you're dealing with the kind of project whose point is just so that someone can say that theirs is bigger, it's not too terribly hard to paper over any questions that might arise about things like safety by handing certain people a briefcase filled with dead Presidents.

I'm going off of memory as to the reason why, but they do pressurize buildings over 50 storeys. It might just be that it's easier to do that than it is to redesign things like toilets or whatever, but that is why you see so many revolving doors as the entrances for really tall buildings, because they spill less air out on to the street than a typical sliding door would.

Google search that for an explanation, but you are somewhat wrong. Any pressurization changes seem to be naturally occurring. Also, most revolving doors are accompanied by regular doors due to handicap regulations for entry.

It may be for air conditioning and heating the buildings prefer revolving doors because they will set up a bubble that keeps breezes from going in and out. However, tall buildings often have roof access, and are normally not close to the hights of mountains where reduced air pressure would be an issue for long periods of time. There would probably be a slight pressure difference due to these systems, but I could find no other reason aside from the operation of HVAC controlled environments inside the building for revolving doors during my search.