Dilapidated Government Buildings & Their Windows

How bad is the California state building where you work? Mechanical failure has kept one building’s windows unwashed for 10 years. Some office structures lack fire sprinklers, contain hazardous materials, suffer from leak.

Fun fact: The windows on the Resources Building in downtown Sacramento haven’t been cleaned in more than a decade. “The window cleaning platform is not functional,” the California Department of General Services stated in a new report on the 51-year-old building. “The windows have not been cleaned in over ten years, and without an operable platform, the exterior tile joints cannot be maintained.”

Other problems inside and outside the building include asbestos in the walls, ceiling and floor tiles, exterior joints around windows that allow water to seep in, a “spongy” roof the verge of leaking and fire-safety systems that aren’t up to code. Those troubles and others gave the 17-story structure at 1416 Ninth St. the ignominious distinction as the most-dilapidated office building that the state owns or leases among the 29 assessed by HOK, a well-known architectural firm.

HOK figures that fixing everything, from replacing restroom exhaust fans to seismically retrofitting the Resources Building’s exterior, would cost $148.8 million. Lawmakers commissioned the first-ever survey of state properties last year. The Brown administration has said the results will guide policy for repairing or replacing government buildings. Want to check on the state building where you work? General Services has posted the results all the state building assessments by HOK. You’ll find them here.

Part of the problem is that many of the building’s 3,000 windows in the Houses of Parliament of the building on the banks of the River Thames in central London will not close properly

Deteriorating Houses of Parliament could catch fire again, warn Parliament officials: The Palace of Westminster is in such a state of disrepair that it could burn down for a second time, senior officials in charge of a major overhaul have warned. MPs are getting stuck in lifts and missing votes because of the scale refurbishment required at the Houses of Parliament, they said.

Part of the problem is that many of the building’s 3,000 windows of the building on the banks of the River Thames in central London will not close properly, further causing more damage to the fabric of the building designed by the architect Augustus Pugin. Richard Ware, the director for the Restoration and Renewal Programme at the Palace of Westminster, said the £50million a year work programme only kept the building working operationally. More fundamental work was needed to stop the building deteriorating further, referring to the last major fire in the Houses of Parliament in 1834. 

A report on the future of the Palace of Westminster concluded in 2012: “If the Palace were not a listed building of the highest heritage value, its owner would probably be advised to demolish and rebuild.” One of the major problems is that asbestos – a deadly substance which was used in the 1940s and 1950s to fireproof buildings - had been “liberally applied all around the building – not just as insulation but in light switches, toilet systems and as a sound suppressant”, Mr Barlex said.

Working At Height & Wind Speed

Skyscrapers like One World Trade Center, now the tallest building in the United States, are not the place to be during hurricanes.

Sandy spared New York’s skyscrapers, but high-rises carry high risk during hurricanes: On Oct. 28, 2012, the day before Superstorm Sandy’s center came ashore over southern New Jersey, the National Weather Service’s New York City office cautioned that one of its computer models was projecting a “possibility of skyscraper window damage” and warned residents to stay away from windows if they lived on the 10th floor or higher.

Fortunately Sandy’s strongest winds had weakened to 70 mph when it came ashore near Brigantine, N.J., the next day. The strongest wind recorded at the NWS Central Park station that day was 38 mph with gusts to 62 mph. In Atlantic City, N.J., however, where the highest reported surface wind was 51 mph with gusts to 64 mph, Sandy did cause minor damage to high-rise building roofs and higher floors. “The problem I saw in New York, especially lower Manhattan, was when the power went out and back-up generators were in flooded basements,” says Tim P. Marshall, a meteorologist and engineer who’s been studying building wind damage for Haag Engineering in Dallas since 1983. “If you’re on the 40th floor, that’s a long way to walk down the stairs.”

Even if you think trudging up and down several stories in a high-rise without elevators is a good way to get in shape, you should evacuate a high-rise condo, apartment, hotel or time share that’s threatened by a hurricane because it’s a potentially deadly place to be. At the very least you should take the following advice from the New York City Office of Emergency Management (and other emergency managers):

On or below the 10th floor: Close and lock all windows and securely cover them to reduce damage and injury caused by flying debris. Above the 10th floor: Be prepared to take shelter on or below the 10th floor.  If you have a balcony or rooftop, remove all items that cannot be securely tied down.

Mean hurricane eyewall wind variation with elevation. To calculate the wind speed at a particular height, put a decimal point after the first ’1′ in the percentage and multiply the surface wind by that number. For example, if the wind at the surface is 80 mph, for the speed at the 20th floor multiply 80 by 1.15.

In the article they say: “The top of a 25-story coastal high-rise in the hurricane eyewall will experience a mean wind that is about 17% higher (or one Saffir–Simpson hurricane-scale category higher) than the surface or advisory value. For this reason, residents who must take refuge in coastal high-rises should generally do so at the lowest levels necessary to avoid storm surge.”

Their study was based in part on data from GPS dropwindsondes that hurricane hunter airplanes had been using since 1998. These are small packages of instruments that measure and radio back atmospheric pressure, temperature, humidity, and wind speed and direction as they fall to the ocean under small parachutes.

Marshall says that buildings “up north, seem to be better built” than many he’s examined across the South. Windows are only one of the problems. Once debris breaks a window the flying glass can break other windows, as he and his colleagues found after Hurricane Alicia hit Galveston and Houston on Aug. 18, 1982 (less than three weeks after he started with Haag Engineering) showering downtown Houston with flying glass.

“The problem is with EIFS clad (Exterior Insulation Finishing System) buildings in the South. I have seen this type of façade get into trouble many times from many hurricanes. There also have been problems with keeping windows intact. Part of the problem is flying debris and the cascade or domino effect when one window breaks and so on.” All in all, an upper floor in a high-rise is no place to be in a hurricane.

The Class Of Manhattan Glass - WFP That!

Carter Horsley’s Top 10 glass-clad Manhattan buildings: Carter Horsley is the editorial director of CityRealty.com and the former real estate editor and architecture critic of the New York Post. Previously, he was a reporter for the New York Times and architecture critic for the International Herald Tribune.

1. 100 Eleventh Avenue: (pictured above) Jean Nouvel is giving Frank O. Gehry and Herzog & deMeuron a run for the money for the design of the city’s most spectacular new building.  At 100 Eleventh Avenue, he has designed a 23-story apartment building with a razzle-dazzle, curved corner with myriad, tilted window shapes and sizes.

2. Chelsea Modern  447 West 18th Street: Audrey Matlock’s design for this new and sleek, residential condominium building in Chelsea for Robert Gladstone not only has a façade of  overlapping angled windows but also permits residents to open their windows by pushing out parallel from the building for ventilation.

3. Metropolitan Tower  136 East 57th Street: Harry Macklowe commissioned Schuman Claman Lichtenstein & Efron to design this dashing, forceful, dramatic, razor-sharp, angled, black, mid-block monolith. It resonates with the Post-Modern Carnegie Hall Tower designed by Cesar Pelli to the west and Citispire designed by Helmut Jahn across 56th Street in the city’s most vertiginous triple-tuning fork. The three close towers will soon be joined by a fourth “finger,” a taller, mixed-used tower across from Carnegie Hall by Extell Development.

4. 165 Charles Street: Richard Meier & Partners has the distinction of having had a developer commission him to build his third handsome glass apartment tower facing the Hudson River just to the south of two nearly identical towers he had just designed for a different developer at 173 and 176 Perry Street.  This fractured trinity ushered in the new era of reflective residential buildings in the city and even got Meier a bigger commission for a larger, and still elegant, glass apartment building, On Prospect Park, at the entrance to Prospect Park in Brooklyn.  Meier, of course, is still the architect for Sheldon Solow’s enormous unbuilt complex south of the United Nations along the East River.

5. Trump Tower: This dark brown tower is notable for its excellent stepped plan that creates an interesting form even with a flat roof and for its lavish atrium with tall marble waterfall. Despite some glitz, this mixed-use tower has élan and swagger and the tree-ed terraces at the 56th Street corner host carolers at holiday time, a very suave and charming touch for Donald Trump, the developer. Trump would follow this with other very slick and handsome glass towers at Trump International Hotel & Tower at 1 Central Park West and Trump World on First Avenue.

6. Time-Warner Center: This is a whole lotta glass.  The city’s most ambitious mixed-use building, its reflective glass facades conceal a marvelous Whole Foods in the basement, a curved four-story high atrium with several very deluxe restaurants, a jazz center, headquarters for Time-Warner, a Mandarin Oriental Hotel and a lot of not inexpensive condominium apartments in its thin, twin towers whose tops are illuminated at night.  David Childs of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill was the architectural chef.

7. 497 Greenwich Street: Winka Dubbeldam designed this rather small but smashing residential condominium project whose attractive glass façade ripples up the north side of the street frontage and over an adjoining smaller building on the south with tiny little balconies separating the two sections.  This was the start of a new exciting era of façade experimentation in the city.

8. 40 Bond Street: Herzog & de Meuron took a gander at the cast-iron architecture of the surrounding neighborhoods and the graffiti-splattered facades of some nearby East Village tenements and, presto, blended one of the city’s most awesome small new residential projects for Ian Schrager and Aby Rosen.  Above the second floor, the façade is formed by large, deep, rounded columns of wonderful richly colored green glass, but the icing at the bottom of this very urban “cake” is the looping, aluminum “scrawl” gate that organically conjures a beatific scroll of graffiti.  Yazzer!  Wow!

9. Atelier at 635 West 42nd Street: No list of glass-clad buildings in the city would be complete without mention of Costas Kondylis, the city’s most prolific residential tower architect.  His projects are consistently good-looking and lately have begun to show some interesting experimentation.  At the 42-story Atelier on West 42nd Street he introduced the motif of “abs” that show off proudly the building’s robust and fine proportions with a touch of sculptural, that is, protruding, grace across the street from his twin silver-glass-clad towers for Larry Silverstein.

10. One Astor Place/445 Lafayette Street: The world’s greatest glass residential building is Lake Point Tower in Chicago, a very sinuous, free-standing tower with no setbacks. At One Astor Place, Gwathmey Siegel & Associates borrowed the sinuosity for the torso of this free-standing apartment tower that is very prominently located between Lafayette Street and the Bowery and Cooper Union. At 26 stories, it became an instant landmark for the new emerging skyline of the East Village and Lower East Side.