This is not my field, but I would have guessed something like that. The earthquake is the bedrock moving mostly horizontally. What is sitting on the bedrock may liquefy and not move as much as the bedrock beneath. A building on something soft like landfill might tilt when it liquefies. A building on bendy legs might move less than the bedrock.
It seems there are two accepted designs. This presumably means even the engineers haven’t determined an outright winner. In this case a particularly tall and narrow building might prefer going down to the bedrock to avoid tilting. The tilting started before the earthquake, which pretty much clinches it now the thing is built, but might not have been obvious from the plans.
Did it get an architectural award? Things like that usually manage at least two.
Sadly, this is what progress looks like. An architectural award is given for building closer to the last known position of the ‘chump line’. It ought to be awarded for building closer to the last known position of the ‘chump line’ and getting away with it. Perhaps the awards ought to be conditional for the first ten years.
Did the Tower of Siloam have awards from the Jerusalem Institute of Architecture and the Galilee Brick Industry?
The engineers either shouldn’t have passed Statics and Dynamics their first year of college, or they were willing to pretend they shouldn’t have. California licenses structural engineers. Have the engineers responsible for ignoring rudimentary vector analysis in the construction of a 58 story high-rise been stripped of their licenses and, if they haven’t, why not?
Honestly not sure how much engineering education architects have. But at the absolute minimum the lead engineer who signed off on telling the developer what they wanted to hear is directly responsible for a lot of damage that’s already happened and far more that may happen.
Also, I get that if you’re a developer and an engineer tells you something you lack the tools to evaluate for yourself, you might make a catastrophic mistake. But by this point if the developers are still doubling down despite the rather damning evidence, they probably should also be held liable, if not for the initial decision then at least for not doing whatever it takes to admit the mistake and fix this very real danger.
Architect’s have some engineering discipline. Bit of mechanical and civil depending on what they are designing. Or what they may specialize in. I believe that they can stamp stuff if they are certified like engineers.
What’s really depressing is that some of those awards are from people who probably should have looked more closely.
It’s not like I’d expect good judgement from the San Fransciso Business Times when handing out the “deal of the year” award(and, even if I did, I wouldn’t exclude the possibility that slipping a dangerously negligent act of cost-optimization past local regulators is a point in favor of receiving the award, not a disqualification).
The American Society of Civil Engineers, though, would ideally hew to standards like ‘not in process of falling over’ before declaring something to be ‘structural engineering project of the year’.
