Stuff You Should Know - Skyscrapers: 'Scuse me while I kiss the sky

Episode Date: June 14, 2018

Skyscrapers are much more than tall buildings. They're world wonders as far as we're concerned. From design to construction, these babies are beautifully simplistic in all the best ways. Listen in today! Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey everyone, we're coming to Salt Lake City, Utah in Phoenix, Arizona this fall. Yeah, October 23rd, we're gonna be at Salt Lake City's Grand Theater, and then the next night, October 24th, we'll be in Phoenix, and we added a second show

to our Melbourne show, right? That's right, a second earlier show in Melbourne, so you can get all the information for all of these shows at S-Y-S-K-Live.com. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast, I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles, so if you took Brian, I almost forgot what I say first.

Smooth the sandpaper. And then there's Jerry right there, so this is the old stuff you should know. The triad. Yeah. But not that kind. What kind? You know, like sexual.

That's, I don't think they call those triads. Sure. That's normally like, a triad's like three mafia families getting together or something like that. And having sex. Right. No, I think a triad very much can apply to a three-person couple, romantic couple.

I'm sure we will hear about that. Yeah, I will, we have, I think that's where I learned it. Oh, I gotcha. We should also, speaking of sex, we should also give a bit of a mea culpa. We use the word prostitute in a couple of recent episodes. I think collar bombs and drug courts. And that is not the okay word these days.

The words you use is sex worker. And I knew that, and I feel bad for saying it. I do too, so sorry to all the sex workers. And we've had sex workers right in before with stories and saying, you know, you should do a podcast on this because it's not always what you think. Right. And we will someday.

Correct. But first, we're gonna do skyscrapers. Yeah, and I gotta say, man, this is, I preface the tsunami episode with like core stuff you should know type stuff. I think this one falls in there. And I kept, maybe it's the little kid in me with like erector sets and Lego and stuff like that.

But I kept thinking, man, skyscrapers are so incredibly simplistic. Yeah. It's so beautiful. And I think beauty and simplicity is something that really gets me. You love Occam's razor. Yeah.

You love it. But the skyscrapers, when I was just reading about how these things are constructed and all, I'm just like, it's like a little kid designed it. Yeah. I actually looked around and I'm like, am I missing a section or two on this article? But no, they're pretty straightforward actually.

Yeah. They're all just giant penises in the sky. No doubt, man. Some of them don't even try to hide it. They've got like ridges and stuff. And a man's name at the top. Yep. It's crazy.

It's like, yeah, I, in researching this, I was like, oh, okay, I get it. Skyscrapers are the jerks of the buildings. Community? Yeah. Well, except maybe not, because they're super efficient at holding people and... Sure, sure.

Okay, so that's well put, man. I'm glad you said that, because there's a bit of a dichotomy going on here. You got the good, you got the bad. You got to put them both together and there you have skyscrapers. All right, so this article in House of Work starts out very appropriately in talking about the quest for height.

And this has been going on since ancient times, whether it's a church cathedral or a tower of Babel, which I looked into that a little bit, so I was trying to see how metaphoric that was. Were that Nimrods? Didn't he build that? You know, that Nimrod? Uh-huh.

I think so, I don't remember. But go ahead, sorry. Well, forget the Tower of Babel. Just ancient buildings, like from the pyramids to the cathedrals, everyone has always wanted to build things tall because it's a striking thing and it probably has a lot to do with the ego of the man

who wanted his name either on it or behind it. Yeah, especially if you're part of a civilization that believes in God and you tend to think that God is in the sky, it's a bit saying like, hey, look at how close I am here, this building is in my name, look at me, look upon me in my building, it's a giant phallus.

Yeah, to the point where there are literal competitions and like, I'm gonna add one extra story or build the little antenna five feet higher just to have that claim. You know, there's something very similar in the roller coaster world, which I think we talked about, but at least it's a roller coaster.

You know what I'm saying, it's not just a building, this is like, I'm gonna build the taller roller coaster than you and the people who ride me are gonna be 7% more scared than your riders. That's doing something if you ask me, you know? But yeah, so there is a definite benefit to building up and early on, yes, it was just basically to glorify a king or a God or something like that, right?

But over time, as people started settling together in city centers and wanting to be close to the city center, there was a good reason to start building upward and it's that space outward was either at a premium or people didn't want it. They wanted to be in one specific spot. So the only option you have, aside from outward, is either upward or downward.

We haven't gotten to subterranean buildings yet. I hope to God we never do. So we started building upward and that's where skyscrapers first came from and they came about, I think in the late 1800s, the 1880s, and I believe the first one was the home life building in Chicago. How tall was that?

10 whopping stories. Yeah, that was a skyscraper back then and I tried to find the first person who said that, but I couldn't. I found something on it. Oh, well, I heard Chicago is where it originated. The term? Yeah.

Yes. As far as buildings go, but it had been in use for a long time before that to describe anything tall. Sure. Including people. What? So like a very tall woman, you could be like, that gal's a real skyscraper,

ain't she? For real. Can she say fresh and slap you in the face? That's right. That's exactly how that would go down. Wow. But yeah, you could use it for like a tall sail on a boat. Oh, I've heard that, yeah.

Tall horse? Anything tall would be called a skyscraper. So it was just inevitable people were going to start referring to tall buildings as skyscrapers. All right. Well, there you have it. Bam. So what you're doing with the skyscraper is

literally fighting gravity. And we mentioned pyramids. When you think about like a cheerleader pyramid, how they reference it in the article, the higher you go, you need more support underneath. And so with a pyramid, you just go wider. And in theory, you could build something as tall as you want, as long as you kept going wider and wider with its foundation

to support it. But like you said, you can't do that because people live near one another and these are in city centers. So they had to come up with some, you know, with the 1800s skyscrapers that were brick and mortar, you could only go so high before it just wasn't possible anymore. There'd just be simply too much weight on that foundation.

So it took advancement and a very specific advancement called iron and steel in order to build these things taller. Right. And so like one of the other problems with brick and mortar is that not just supporting the weight, you could add more brick and more mortar, but either you're going to start spreading further and further out and create a bigger and bigger footprint for your building

and start running up against your neighbors, or you're using up more and more of the space in the lower floors. Yeah. So you have like maybe like a little chamber corridor that you can make it through. And then that's it for your lower floors. So it doesn't make any sense. But with the advent of iron and steel,

you suddenly had relatively lighter, stronger, and thinner basically building materials to work with. So you could go way taller and use up way less of a footprint on the ground. Yeah. And you know, it started with iron. So you could get these super long, sturdy, solid beams. And then of course steel was even lighter and stronger than iron.

Actually came from iron or comes from iron. Yeah. It's like super pure iron. Yeah. And that the deal, I looked up that Bessemer process a little bit and then my eyes glazed over a bit. They mentioned the Bessemer process, but it was really something called the open hearth process from 1865

that really like brought steel into mass production. Is that just literally removing impurities from iron? Is that how you get steel? Uh-huh. From what I understand it's super pure iron. And I mean steel's been around for, since I think the 13th century BCE. So thousands of years we've been using steel.

But for the most part it's just been like some artisan blacksmith who like works with one small piece at a time. And the steel that they were making was not very good. It was pretty brittle. And it was stronger than like, you know, your average rock or something like that. But you couldn't make a building out of it. Then once they figured out that Bessemer process

and then the open hearth process where they purified iron and could make large amounts of it at once. Now you suddenly have the kind of climate that skyscrapers can be built in. Yeah. What I was saying was you can't make a building from a long sword. No, you can't. Or is it a broad sword?

Either one. It depends on what country you're in. Oh, okay. All right. So let's talk about my favorite part of this whole thing, which is the skeleton and the superstructure. It's just so beautifully simplistic again. The steel skeleton is the support structure of a skyscraper.

And these are literally just vertical columns made up of metal beams that are riveted together end to end. Right. And a big giant box. And then at every floor, first floor, second floor, third floor. Oh, keep going. You're going to have obviously horizontal girders. And those are just, I was going to say strapped.

That wouldn't be very safe. Those are just riveted, a good ratchet strap will do it. Right. Strap with like a bit of leather. That's it. That's what holds them together. Those are riveted to the columns. And that's it on top.

Right. So yeah, you've got vertical columns going up. You have girders going horizontally. And then you'll have like diagonal supports that stabilize the girders, right? Yeah, those came along a little later. Right. And all of these things put together, it forms like, like what it's called the skeleton, the structure of the building.

And it holds up everything because everything is connected to those vertical columns. Right. Which is pretty great, but it creates an issue in that all the weight is getting transferred straight down through those vertical columns. Yeah. That's what it does. So like all of the horizontal weight, like from the floors, from like the desks you put in there, from the drywall, from everything, it all gets transferred to those vertical

columns, which means that you better have some number one sturdy vertical columns, but you can't just build this thing on the sidewalk. No. You've got to mount them pretty well to the earth. And the way you do that is there's a sub layer of clay that you want to dig down to, depending on how heavy your building is. If it's really heavy, you want to dig down to the bedrock, which is the actual crust of the earth.

And the rest is just debris and detritus. Yeah. This substructure, I think, is kind of the coolest thing. I agree. So do you remember when we were talking about how if you build with brick and mortar, the taller you build, the thicker the walls have to be to where you have like basically no room left in the lower levels. They figured out how to take that and put it underground and then build a superstructure

on top of it. And that's what they did. Yeah. It's a little vertical column, and to make it simple, let's just think of four corners of a building, though the structure is much more complicated than that with huge buildings, obviously. But each one of those vertical columns sits on a spread footing, which is basically, and if you look at the picture on the website article or just Google it, it's really, again,

beautifully simplistic. It sits on a big square cast iron plate, and then that sits on what's called grillage, which are just stacks of horizontal steel beams. And they're just lined up, and then it's almost like a Jenga tower. You'll line them up going one way, and then the next layer will be lined up going the other way. And they've done a little math to figure out how many they need. And that grillage sits on concrete, this big concrete pad that's on that clay or the bedrock.

And then all of that stuff is buried in concrete. Just for good measure. Just for good measure. And then we coat that in butterscotch. I know that's not going to get it, huh? So like you said, you just got this pyramid, essentially, underground supporting each column. The toughest pyramid anyone has ever made in the history of humanity is one of these spread footings.

Tougher than the one from Bring It On, the movie? Yes, tougher than that one. This is a good movie, by the way. That's what I've heard. But that's just under one vertical column. And again, if you have just a simple four-column structure, you've got four of those taking the weight and distributing the force of gravity pressing down on every square centimeter of this building.

It's going down to the spread footing and just being distributed back into the earth saying, there you go, fellas. Go on your merry way and leave this building be. That's right. I will take your load and spread it thin. And before we take a break, we should mention that all of this means, this skeletal structure means that your outer walls, which are the curtain walls, they can be wide open. And so that's why you see floor-to-ceiling glass and a lot to most of these.

Yeah. Because you don't need it to support anything. No, just itself. That's the only thing it has to support. So that was like a huge revolution in construction. The idea that you could build with this new material, well, not new, but newly refined material, newly available material that could support a huge tall building and that you could just put an outside wall onto, well, then now you can do whatever you want with

these things. It really kind of opened things up. And there was a huge change in construction design in skyscrapers pretty quickly after they were introduced. Yeah. You want to take a break before we talk about that? Yeah, because the functionality of this, which comes next, is probably my second favorite thing.

Oh boy. On the podcast, HeyDude, the 90s, called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever.

Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? Also leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing.

Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to HeyDude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing.

Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man.

And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Uh-huh. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy.

You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, Chuck. So we're talking functionality, which as you said, is your second favorite thing about

skyscrapers, right? Well, yeah, because you think of an architect thinking, man, let's just build this tall thing, but there's, there's a function of the building beyond let's make it look cool or impressive, which is people live and work and run business out of these things. Hey, by the way, I'm sorry, man, this is so, this doesn't even qualify as a tangent, it's so off base, but you just said architect, one of our architect friends, Adam Ruffin, and his wife, Serena, welcomed their second son recently. Oh, great.

Congratulations, you guys, and I also, while I'm at it, want to give a shout out to my friends Laurel and Brayden for their second son as well. So everybody's having second sons these days, and congratulations to all of you guys. That's great. You know, Adam, I'm actually building my house up, I'm putting on a second story, and sent some plans to Adam that didn't quite look right, and said, hey, man, you know, you told me in New York to hitch you up for a little free consult. Nice.

And he said, here's what's wrong, and he went boop, boop, boop, boop, and just sent me back a little advice sketch. Oh, that was very cool. And I was like, he kind of solved it. He's like, it was fine, they just had it upside down. Now it's fixed. It's going to be weird looking. Yeah, that was nice of him.

Did you send him like a muffin basket or something? I didn't, but maybe I'll send him like some baby booties now. Oh, there you go, made of muffins. Baby booties. All right, so these things have to be functional, because people work in them, big business runs out of these things, important things happen. And much like when we were designing our second floor, it's not as easy as just, boom, there's a second story.

When we were working with our local architect, he was like, well, you got to get up there. And that's when it first hit me of the problem. What did he mean by that? You have to be able to access the second story. Sure, sure, gotcha. So that's when it really hit home, the problem of stairs. And he was like, no one ever thinks about it. And he said, that's usually the biggest issue when designing like a second floor build on

an existing home, is that you got to fit stairs somewhere. And in the case of skyscrapers, those stairs become elevators. Right, which you don't think about it at all. And yeah, you would not have skyscrapers if you didn't have elevators. And it just so happens that they coincided at about the same time. Yeah, I think in New York, a department store in 1857 was the first passenger elevator. And it was an Otis brand elevator. Oh, that's great.

Was it really? Yeah. Yeah. I think built by Elijah Otis himself. I love that. I'm pretty sure it's a hymn. I'd feel really terrible if that was like the inventor of the elevator was a woman and I didn't know it, you know?

I agree, for shame. I guess the H makes it a hymn. If it was Eliza Otis, then it'd be a woman, but Elijah Otis is the man's version of that. Probably so. Okay. But we'll check on that. Yeah. And if we're wrong, then we will have re-recorded that and you will never know.

But this elevator is, it points out in this article is very plainly, like it's a balancing act. You need to get, you can't have a lobby full of people standing in line for 15 minutes because you don't have enough elevators, but then elevator shafts take up a lot of room in the building. So you've got to do the math and figure out the perfect little balance between how many people can we have in this office tower and how many elevators do we need to get them there in due time?

Right. And so first of all, we talked about elevators in our Elevators episode. Great episode, if you'll remember correctly. But when you add elevators, you're taking up valuable real estate. Right? Like that's just a place where you can't put an office because you've got an elevator shaft going there. So if you want to make your money back on that real estate, you got to add more floors.

But if you have more floors, you add more people and if you have more people, you need more elevators. What's an architect to do? Right. You just go home for the day. Elijah Otis, by the way, either a magnificently bearded woman or an actual man. Okay, good. Okay.

Oh, wow. Look at that. An immediate update. Yeah. And look at the hair too. He's basically got my haircut, except it's a little wavier on the sides. Nice. So we couldn't have skyscrapers without elevators.

Apparently, I think five or six floors is about the max you would want to not have an elevator in. You know, before the American with Disabilities Act, right? So just from just logistically speaking, you couldn't go more than five or six floors. So we've got elevators. There's also another innovation that had to happen. And that was with like fire sprinklers, which those came surprisingly late for a lot of commercial buildings.

Like there are a lot of hotel fires up until the early 1980s that killed a lot of people before they finally mandated that you need sprinklers in these things because it's ridiculously dangerous to not have fire sprinklers. But with the advent of fire sprinklers, it made buildings a lot safer. And that was one thing that you want to have in a high rise or a skyscraper because it's really, it takes a while to get downstairs during a fire. So you just want the fire to be put out so you can get back to work. Yeah, and then the final little piece of that puzzle of design is to, it should be a place

people want to be in an office they want to work in within reason. So the comfort of the occupants is a big deal. When they designed the Empire State Building, they wanted to make sure that no one would ever be more than 30 feet away from a window, which is a nice thing to do. It is because sunlight, everyone knows reaches 32 feet. So there you go. And did you, did you see, did you look up this commerce bunk in Germany? No, I didn't.

I did not. I feel like it's really lovely. They have all these indoor gardens and it's just gorgeous. It's like a place that you look at and you think, and you know, it's not, they're not silk plants. They're real trees and things. Oh yeah. And it is just beautiful.

I love that, like I just love that about buildings that have like indoor straight up like gardens. You know, there's one, I can't remember where it is, somewhere in Dunwoody that has like waterfalls and stuff like that and trees going in there. Like I always appreciated embassy suites because they usually, I don't think they do any more, but they used to have like whole like gardens and stuff in the lobby and everything. There's just something about a garden inside a house or a building that says like, we own you nature. It's a very wonderfully oppressive thing.

Maybe that's what I appreciate about it. What's the one in Atlanta with the great interior atrium? I don't, I don't know. No. Oh, the Marriott Marquis? No. Yeah. The one with the elevators?

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, the Marquis. Yeah. I can't remember, is a pretty famous architect and designer who I think passed away within the last like year or so. Oh, really? Yeah. And that's one of the great, and there are a lot of good plants in there too, but that's

one of the great sort of retro interior atriums that I've seen. Yeah. It's got that great like mod feel to it. It's just, it's a good, good building. I wonder who did it. I can't remember. I remember though being, when I was a, I believe a senior in high school, that was where the party was on New Year's Eve, and they somehow rented rooms to a bunch of 17 year olds throughout

the building. Yeah, that's dangerous. And it was dangerous, like for real. Like I remember, I remember hugging, the only covered part was the very, like you had to kind of hug the wall, and you had a lip that you could walk under, and I remember walking under there and seeing televisions and potted plants like smashing on the floor from idiot children throwing them off the balconies. That is so dangerous.

I know. Oh my God. They changed. That was like the last year. They had a big policy shift after that. That's like the Lord of the Flies. It was. I mean, my friends and I, we were, I mean, I didn't drink in high school, but all my friends

were, but we were all like, man, we're getting out of here. This is bad news. Yeah. And we were good kids. Good for you, buddy. By the way, it was John C. Portman, Jr., who was the architect. Right. Nice work.

All right, Chuck, now we come to, what might be my favorite, if not second favorite part, which is what wind does to a skyscraper. Take it away. So wind does some crazy stuff to a skyscraper. The end. It blows on it. Yeah. Actually, it does crazy stuff.

So like when, when a, when wind encounters a skyscraper, a skyscraper will sway, okay? That's actually okay. They have designed skyscrapers, taking into account really heavy gusts of wind and the building is almost certainly not going to fall down. There's actually this really great New Yorker story from the nineties about a, it's called the 59 story crisis, and it's about the city corp center, which in 1978 opened. And after it opened, basically the architect or the engineer realized he like didn't carry a one or something like that.

And that the whole building was in danger of collapsing, fully occupied now. And that there were, there were hurricanes headed toward New York that had just the kind of wind that could knock this building down. So they did like this emergency retro, like, like support structure addition. Like they carved out the interior walls and just started working on it, and they managed to save the building. Is that what the damper is for? So the damper is different.

This was like, they, they added like basically extra rivets. He went cheap on the rivets or something like that. Well, I did think it was funny in the article, it said, you know, one thing you can do is just simply tighten up the rivets and things. Right. Like when do you go, I feel like it's tight enough. Well, so I think, right, more than hand tight. Perfectly tight.

Right. I think they're saying if you add more rivets and more places, it'll, it'll make the, the building stronger and, and it won't, it won't strain underneath the, the wind. The problem is, is what you've just done is create like a very solid pole and just with any kind of pole, when it sways, the end of it, like a fishing pole is the part that bobbles the most, right? Same thing with the skyscrapers. So the upper floors are really in, they, they're subject to sway from the wind again.

They usually, except for this 1978 city corp thing, they usually account for this stuff and then some, but the problem is humans get really freaked out and not just like psychologically, like on a primal level, get really freaked out when we're high up and we start moving and we're not, we're not under, it's not under our control. So like the building might be sound, but if word gets out from people that, that it sways, people will think it's not sound. And so you'll never sell the upper floors, you'll never rent out the upper floors and maybe the whole building will be stayed away from because people will think it's going

to collapse at any moment. So because of this rumor mill, engineers actually designed for the most sensitive people who I think can sense something like 15 milligees. So a G is like a force of acceleration, which is actually what you're sensing when you're swaying somewhere, like in the top of a building. This is 15 thousandths of one G, right? When you're on a roller coaster, you're experiencing like three, four, five Gs. This is 15 thousandths of one G and that's what they designed for because beyond that,

they found people will start complaining and then word might get out that the building is unsound. Kind of like bring Maury in here. He's a real wimp. Yeah, exactly. What do you think, Maury? Oh. Right.

Okay. Tighten it up, everybody. But tightening it up only goes so far, right? If the taller you get, tightening doesn't help, so you got to add other stuff. They've come up with some pretty ingenious stuff for that. Yeah. Like in the sort of, I guess what I would call it, the middle period, like Empire State Building period, they started just around that elevator shaft in the middle, just trussing

that up with more beams, diagonal beams. And then more recently, they've just built these huge concrete cores right in the center of the building. But that's not the coolest part, is it? No, the damper is the coolest part or the mass tuned damper, I think. Yeah. The tuned mass damper, I'm sorry. And I think we talked about this.

It must have been in the 9-11 Memorial. Yeah, I think so. But this is one of those things that, again, it seems like, whoa, they're getting really complex because they're using computers and things now. But at its root, a tuned mass damper system is also super rudimentary. Don't you think? Yeah, it really is. So like if the building's swaying one way, they'll put like a huge concrete disk on top

of some oil or something so it can slide. And they'll move that the opposite way. I know. So it's like, you know how like if you're walking a tightrope or on like a train track or something like that, and you start to sway one way like you're going to fall off, you shift your body's weight the other way and you manage to stay upright. This is the same thing. But with the building going one way, the concrete disk goes the other way and the building's

sway is kept within an acceptable limit. Yeah, I mean, it's amazing that someone just said, what if we swung a big weight up there to counteract the sway, and it gets a little with hydraulics and the computer is actually is what's monitoring the wind and operating this thing. So that's where it gets a little complicated. But at its root, it's just like again, like a kid said, well, why don't you just do this? And so there's some that use like the huge concrete weight. Some will use enormous like vats of water to slosh back and forth against the sway.

There's this stuff called magnet or geological fluid, which changes from a solid, it's normally in a solid state. And then when you pass a magnetic field over it, it just instantly turns to fluid. So they have some dampers in some buildings. I don't know if it's actually in use or not, or if it's still proposed. But on each floor toward the center of the building, you'll have a damper made of this stuff in like a vat. And then when like say an earthquake is detected or some sort of seismic activity is detected,

it'll trip a magnet that runs a magnetic field over these things. And all of a sudden they turn into liquid and they start sloshing the opposite way and keep the building from swaying too far too. All right. Well, that's not rudimentary. No, it's not. That's magic. That's voodoo.

It is pretty much. Should we take a break? I think so, man. All right, well, we'll talk a little bit about design right after this. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal?

No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? You'll leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you.

Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step

by step. Oh, not another one. Uh-huh. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. Okay, Chuck, so we're, we're on to design now, by the way. Yeah. And the earliest ones were basically like, look at the size of this building I built. And everyone said, well, it's ugly as sin. Right. The architect and engineer and the builder and the owner would say, it doesn't matter.

It's taller than any of your buildings. And everyone would say, that's, that's true. But as, as buildings got taller and taller and like a new one went up every few months or few, you know, every year in some of the cities around the world, like New York, London, those two, like it became a lot more important what the building looked like. Yeah. So, I mean, in the twenties and thirties, into the forties with what one of my favorite movements, the Ardeco movement, love it.

You get my favorite building, which is the Chrysler building and the Empire State Building, which is still just gorgeous to look at, you know. So when we're in New Zealand, if you have time, there's a town there called Napier. And it got leveled by an earthquake in 1930. And they said, well, we're going to rebuild the town, what's like the, the current trend in architecture? Oh, it's Art Deco. So it's an Art Deco town.

Oh my gosh. The whole town is, it's gorgeous, man. It's all in like pastels and everything. It's just a beautiful town from the 1930s that they just rebuilt all Art Deco. Wow. You're going to love it. You're going to check that out for sure. Yeah.

So that was, that rang true for a while, but then eventually, you know, like, you know, architecture goes in trends and we had a bad trend in the 1960s and Atlanta certainly has its share of international style buildings is what it's called, which I don't know why, but for some reason they sort of just reverted back to these monoliths and a lot of them were torn down in Atlanta, but some of them are still here and they're just, they're the ugliest buildings in the city. I like some of them, like not necessarily the ones in Atlanta, but like the Sears Tower, the Willis Tower is, is an international style.

Is it? Yeah. The UN. That was interesting at least because it's staggered. Right. Okay. That's still technically international style. The UN headquarters in New York, international style.

Some of them can have a retro style now. Right. I think that's what I appreciate about some of them, but yeah, you're right. Some of them are also just like, that is just fuggly. Yeah. Yeah. You know? And the Sears or Willis Tower, we still call it the Sears Tower.

Let's be honest. Yeah. Okay. That one is unique in that it is, it's, it's tubes, right? Yeah. And they're staggered in height. So they kind of played with this new thing for, I think, I don't know if it was for the skeleton or what, but they, they built like steel tubes and then fill them with concrete.

Right. So that provided the structure, but they, they, they staggered them. So it created this cool look to the building that it's known for. Yeah. I did the architectural river tour in Chicago when I was there last summer and the lady we had was great. She told us the story. I just couldn't remember it quite right.

Yeah. It is the Sears Tower. I feel bad for Mr. Willis, but it's, it's just the Sears Tower. And then you've got now kind of like, like whatever, whatever you want to do. That's what we want. Like in some, some are great. Some are not so great, but I think that's always been the way with skyscrapers. Some are great and some are not so great, but either way, you've got a big old skyscraper

in your city now, whether you like it, how it looks or not. Yeah. They're getting kind of funky. In a place like New York where it's like even one, is it one World Trade Center now? The Freedom Tower. Oh, right. But I believe they call it one WTC still as well. No?

Is it? I don't know. Well, let's just call it the Freedom Tower. We'll call it one World Trade Center. You're right. That one fits in even though it has a newish look, but it fits into the landscape because it's, there's a lot of tall buildings in New York. When you see like sometimes in the Middle East, like in, although Dubai's got a lot

of tall ones now or Malaysia, they will be so much taller than the surrounding buildings that it's just sort of odd looking to me. Well, plus also, you know, you hope that the architect is going to design the thing to fit the surroundings rather than really stand out, but regardless, I mean, these are not public buildings. These are privately owned buildings almost across the board and you, the city dweller who lives there and has to look at this thing every day are totally at the mercy of the person designing it.

Yeah. Like that's, that's whatever gets put up, gets put up and you had no say whatsoever in it, which can be good in a lot of cases. It can also be bad, but there are, it seems like more often than not, the stuff that they're putting up these days is pretty, pretty interesting to look at. Like there's Zaha Hadid, who I think won the Pritzker Prize a couple of years ago. I think she died recently. She put up this building, I don't know if it's done yet or not, but it's called 1000

Museum Tower in Miami and it is gorgeous. It's super Miami, like the exterior skeleton actually twists and curves and the snakes around the outside of the curtain wall, even in some points, but it fits. Like it fits Miami, like you just look at this building, you're like, I can't imagine that building anywhere else in the world or more at home anywhere else in the world than Miami. Yeah. So it's good.

Like it's neat. It's interesting. It's cool to look at, but it also fits the surroundings. Yeah. For sure. And you know, that one, I just looked at it, it's pretty cool looking. It looks, some of them are looking very futuristic now to me. That looks very futuristic, yes.

Yeah. Which is, you know, it's fine. I'm kind of, I like the throwback style, but I don't mind a little future every now and then. Okay. All right. The question of how high can you go is very hotly debated. Some designers and architects say, if you had enough money, you could go a mile high.

Other people say, no, you probably couldn't. It's not very feasible. At least not now. Yeah, but in the future, you know, and they say this is an efficient way to build is up and environmentally friendly is to go up. Right. It is. In some ways.

It depends. It depends. Did you read that one article about glass? Yeah. So that's pretty hotly debated right now in the architectural community, huh? Yeah. I don't know if they're trying to start it up or if it is actually already a thing of debate, but there are some architects, some pretty prominent ones too, who said, we should

stop like building glass towers. Right. They're kind of cold. They're unfeeling. They just don't create a sense of community plus they're super wasteful. Like they're really expensive and consume a lot of energy to heat and cool because there's a lot of loss of heat and a lot of heat creeping in depending on the time of the year. And they're just kind of wasteful actually.

And that coupled with the idea that there's now this trend moving toward tearing down taller and taller buildings and replacing them with even taller new skyscrapers, especially when there's really nothing wrong with that skyscraper in the first place. But say like in Chicago, if the Willis family had known that their tower was still going to be known as the Sears Tower no matter what, they may have torn that thing down and built something else in its place, right? And that seems to be the trend. It's like, oh, that'll always be known as this building.

I want to tear it down and put up my own building. That is super, duper wasteful. And those are two big criticisms as far as skyscrapers are going right now in the world from what I can understand. Yeah. That one article you sent said that 270 Park in New York will be the first building taller than 200 meters to be demolished, and that the average lifespan, there was a study from the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat that found the average lifespan of the 100

tallest demolished buildings is 41 years. That is not long enough. For the amount of expense that goes into them, the amount of materials and energy, I think that same article says these things should be built for 100 to 200 years. What is it? A football stadium? Basically, yeah. They don't even have 41 years.

Are you kidding me? No, they really don't. Like 14, 15 years now. Yeah, think about it, man. So the Braves Stadium, the Ted was like built in 96 for the Olympics. And it was abandoned two years ago. So it made it 20 years, 20 years. And it's being used now.

Georgia State took it over, but it was a perfectly good baseball stadium, 15 minutes for my house. And then with the Falcon Stadium, that one, there was nothing wrong with that one, was there? The Georgia Dome? Yeah. No, but I got to say, man, that new Mercedes-Benz stadium is... Is it nice? Man, it's awesome.

I haven't been in it yet. It's very cool. It feels like you're at an outdoor game, even with the roof closed. Oh, cool. The way they built it is just, you should check it out at some point. I mean, it is beautiful. Like I get that. It's not lost on me.

I'm not just such a grump or a critic that I'm just like, no, it doesn't matter. Like I get that there's also a lot of like civic pride, especially that goes into a building like that. Yeah. But it's also super wasteful to just tear something down while it's still totally fine rather than renovating it. And of course, all the controversy, especially for sports stadiums around tax dollars paying for them, even though it's usually a hotel tax, so they can say like, it's not on you.

It's on the people that come to Atlanta. Yeah. I don't know if they did that in Cobb County. I think it was a straight up like citizens tax. I think so for the baseball one. You also sent a cool article though about wood skyscrapers and how this is a new trend. And apparently ahead of schedule, Brock Commons, a student, I guess it's a dormitory at University of British Columbia is now the tallest as of now, the tallest wooden structure at 18

stories. Yeah. And you think like, well, wood, that's not good. We don't want to start using wood for skyscrapers. It is good. Apparently it is good that it can be sustainably sourced and that it can actually, you know, it uses like, in some cases, 30% less energy than creating a skyscraper using concrete and steel.

And that's not including like transport costs or transport emissions as well. That's strictly in production. And the stuff they're making or using now is called cross laminated timber, which supposedly is as strong as steel. The big drawback to it is like twice the price right now. Yeah. It's just a, it's like what you get with like press board. It's sheets of wood glued together and compressed together.

And when you look at this Brock Commons, it just, you know, looks like an ordinary building. And there's another building going up somewhere in Japan. I couldn't find where it's called the W350 building, which I guess stands for wood and it's 350 meters tall. Which is, that's like a 35 story skyscraper made of wood and I think 10% steel, but the rest is wood. That's going to be really something. And I imagine a pretty big proving ground for, you know, this new material.

Yeah. And you mentioned that it can be sustainable and because the first thing I thought of, of course, is like, now we're going to tear it on the forest to build buildings. But they say that less than 1% of the world's forests are harvested each year. It sounds like a hornet's nest to me. It does, but you know, they did this in Canada and they said it was a super green project and like the way forward and I trust the Canadians on that stuff. Me too, man.

So like we just would be the worst human beings alive if we didn't talk about the tallest buildings in the world and the competition for it. Yeah. And how quick you mentioned the glass didn't, didn't they have that one building in London that like melted a car? Yeah. The walkie-talkie building. Yeah.

That was one of the problems with glasses. Do you remember when we were in Buckhead, the sovereign building next door? Yes. Did you ever walk past it and through the beam of light? Yeah. It was blinding. It was really hot too. Yeah.

You could imagine like under certain circumstances, it could like burn you. Well, there's a building in London that they had to shade even further because it melted a car that was parked in that beam of light. Melted a car. Yeah. Boy. All right. So the tallest, I mean, it's, I think they said there's something like 20 buildings under

construction that will eclipse the Burj Khalifa. Oh, is that right? Wow. And I think that's currently number one. Undisputed. The Jeddah Tower, J-E-D-D-A-H in Saudi Arabia will be 3,280 feet high and that'll be done in just a couple of years. Yeah.

That's over, it's 1,000 meters, I think on the nose if I'm not mistaken. And this is one of those that sticks out like it's worth them too. It definitely does. And then there's also one that might be the tallest for a brief time because I think it's going to be completed before the Jeddah Tower, but it's in Dubai and it's called the Tower and it'll be 928 meters or 3,045 feet. That's, I mean, I know they say it's good to go up, but I don't know, that stuff makes me nervous.

There's a picture of the Jeddah Tower to where a substantial portion of it, maybe the top third is above the cloud lines. I saw that picture. And it's like, yeah, it wouldn't necessarily be like that every day, but theoretically if that's even possible, I can't imagine how much like those upper floor penthouses are going to go for. It's just nuts, man, but they're building them. I think the Tower in Dubai is expected to cost a billion dollars, which I'm like, that

seems kind of inexpensive to me for a 1,000 meter building. Well, I know one person who wouldn't live at the top of that thing and he's sitting across from me. I just like to see pictures of it and get woozy down here at sea level. I don't even have a height thing and it makes me nervous. Yeah, I'm with you. So I guess it's about it. Well, one more thing, there's a lot of debate over what constitutes the world's tallest

building and the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat that you mentioned before. They said that there's actually no real definition of a skyscraper, but there are some types, some categories, I guess, where there are definitions. There's a super tall, which is 300 meters or more, mega tall, which is 600 meters or more. And hella tall. And then a tall building is up to 300 meters, but there's no starting basis for it. Wow.

But there you go. A skyscraper can be anything tall just like in the old days. I love it. If you want to know more about skyscrapers, just start looking around. They're everywhere. And you can also read about them on how stuff works by typing skyscraper in the search bar and so I said, that's time for Listener Mail. I'm going to call this very smart lady emailed us, Camilla, size or Cs, S-I-S-E, about Occam's

razor. And it was very nice about it, too. Yeah. Did you read this one? Mm-hmm. She said, I thought I'd give a small clarification slash correction might give you some insight on the alleged subjectivity of it. You explained that principle was, when confronted with competing explanations, one should select

the simplest one. She said, this very common misconception, it should be the most parsimonious, how about that word? Mm-hmm. Explanation is more likely to be true. She said, it seems nitpicky, but it eliminates a lot of the subjectivity you complained about in the episode. The most parsimonious means the most economic in the sense that it makes the least amount

of assumptions. That makes total sense because each additional assumption you are making is an additional chance of being wrong. For example, the ghost in the photo makes the assumption that ghosts exist, something that has not been proven, whereas the naturalistic explanation doesn't need to assume the existence of any light phenomena you use to explain that picture because those all have been proven to exist. Makes sense.

Right around that. Right, so I feel like we did talk about that a little bit, but we weren't very explicit and I think we kind of walk past the idea that that's the basis of the whole thing. Yeah, she said, as you explained very well, it doesn't disprove the ghost hypothesis, it just makes it less likely to be true. Most of science is not about proving things anyway, it's about inferring the most likely explanations to phenomena. Yeah.

I hope that helps keep up the great work. That is Camilla size and that is a good email. Yeah, thanks a lot Camilla. I'll appreciate that and a few people wrote in kind of saying something similar, but she definitely put it best. Yep. If you want to set us straight, you can hang out with us on Twitter. I'm at Josh underscore um underscore Clark, Chuck's at Movie Crush Pod and we're both

at SYSK podcast on Twitter, Chuck's on Facebook.com slash Movie Crush Pod. I actually spend a lot of time on the Movie Crush Facebook page. Okay, so if you want to hang out with Chuck on Facebook, go to facebook.com slash Movie Crush. He's also on facebook.com slash Charles W. Chuck Bryant and slash SYSK or no, Stuff You Should Know. I mean, you're all over Facebook, aren't you? If you want to send us all including Jerry an email, you can send it to stuffpodcast.housestuffworks.com

and as always join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. On the podcast, Hey Dude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you

get your podcasts. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts.