July 20, 2007
Vertigo-Inducing Views From One Rincon
Since it's bound to open soon and we'll certainly never be able to step foot inside of the million dollar-plus apartments in SF's new and phallic-y One Rincon Hill -- biggest apartment building west of the Mississippi, damn straight -- the scary-sounding and fancy-named Telstar Logistics snapped some shots from inside the budding building.
Enjoy them while you can, plebeians.
(Images courtesy of Telstar Logistics)
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Um, why haven't I seen this being built.
This isn't the building downtown, right?
How did I miss something this big?
Jiminy Cricket... I might be going senile.
The other day, driving West off the Bay Bridge, I wondered to myself, why would someone want to live so freakin' close to the freeway. And after the earthquake last night...
megang-though you might be scared as hell in a quake a modern high rise is not a bad place to be. Some day when the big one comes you'll see where the people die
Telstar Logistics is Todd Lappin who was an editor at Wired and Business 2.0 and is now at http://www.bnet.com
http://telstarlogistics.com/aboutus.html
http://www.telstarlogistics.com/whoistelstar.html
[3] the 65th floor of a high rise is not a bad place to be in a quake? eh, what????
Just like the passengers in first class of a plane, those on the top floor of 1 rincon will bite it big time in a big one.
Tell me...would you rather be in a modern skyscraper that has been engineered to sustain an earthquake or a 2 unit flat in an area such as...lets say...the marina during the big one?
OK, so the engineering in a super mega high-rise is such that it won't fall down go boom, maybe, but instead it sways. It sways back and forth about 30 feet. The taller the building, the greater the sway.
If someone is inside, they will be slammed from side to side, up against first one wall and then another.
Unless their home has furniture, and then they'll be slammed against the sharp edges of furniture.
Or unless they have the sliding door open, and then it's whoops! out out and awaaaay!
High rise building in SF should be capped at something reasonable for earthquake country... I would have like to have had it at 20 stories (200 feet) or less, but that ain't gonna happen.
Chief Building Inspector agrees.
The new DBI director has ordered developer indescretion challenges to be expedited and NOT be sent back to planning for review. This is in keeping with his delay of enforcing the new State seismic codes in order to expedite the some 60 high end, high rise projects in the pipeline. Unfortunately the Chief Building Inspector's role has been seriously curtailed, perhaps because of his views on mega high rises here.
"High rise building in SF should be capped at something reasonable for earthquake country... I would have like to have had it at 20 stories (200 feet) or less, but that ain't gonna happen."
One Rincon is probably well below a "reasonable" height for building in earthquake country. For example, Taiwan has a 101 story tower in Taipei 101, or the Petronas Towers in Malaysia!
Is [7] right? . . . "slammed from side to side"?
I live on Rincon Hill, and I slept right through that quake this morning.... me loves me some bedrock.
these photos were already linked on sfist - http://sfist.com/2007/06/19/day_around_the_37.php
[9] guest:
The sway is correct, and if someone is in the top floors of a mega high-rise, he will indeed be ragdoll-tossed against whatever is in the room.
After a few back-and-forths, the top of the building will come back to the position as it was before. Probably with a lot of missing and broken glass, and depending on the time of day, a lot of injuries to whomever was inside at the time.
Earthquake engineering
The condo is the first building in the United States to have a liquid tuned mass damper. It is designed to reduce sway from earthquakes and powerful Pacific winds and it's located on the very top of the building at the 62nd floor or 57 floors above ground level from the main entrance.[3]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Rincon_Hill#_note-2
megang and CRS aptly demonstrate the quality of science education in America.
Tall buildings have several kinds of technology (look up "dampers") to ensure their safety in earthquakes. Codes are continually getting stricter. Today's buildings UNQUESTIONABLY safer than the ones built in past years. In some circumstances, taller buildings will sway less than shorter ones (look up "harmonic frequency")
CRS, how many people were slammed from one wall to the other during the '89 quake?
The Rincon building is fugly, of course but at least it's safe.
Please resume posting in ignorance of science or engineering.
Well, [14] guest,
Are you the same guest as answered in [13]?
At any rate, no need to be so pissy in your answer.
Do you really think anyone would have learned about "liquid tuned mass dampers" in science class? Seriously now.
Kind of a fancy name for "water tank."
No, can't say that I heard of injuries in mega high-rises in 1989, but there may have been some, I don't know.
On the other hand, there weren't any residential mega high-rises in 1989. The really tall buildings are office buildings, and the earthquake hit at 5:04.
So, hopefully the big fancy water tank perched above the top floor of One Rincon will do the job it's designed to do, and I am wrong.
Guest 14 here. Not the same as guest 13. Sorry, didn't mean to be pissy, just direct. I don't expect anyone to learn about dampers in science class (it's not just a water tank, see the description at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuned_mass_damper).
But one may learn some fundamentals of physics, like the unlikelihood of being tossed "up against first one wall and then another". Even more generally, one may learn enough to not make blanket statements ("the taller the building, the greater the sway") about complicated engineering systems.
For earthquake safety, the most important factor isn't the height of the building, it's the date it was built/refurbished: the newer the better.
Anyway, there are plenty of reasons to criticize the tower, like its stupid blue glass look, but if the big one hits soon, you'd probably be safer there than almost anywhere else.
hooray! high-rise luxury housing for folks who likely won't even live here most of the time.
Has anyone else noticed what this monster has done to much of the City's views of the bridge? What was once a picturesque view of the four bridge towers and a graceful chain of lights has been reduced to nothing but a big ugly monument to excess. The super-richy-rich who will be able to afford skycubicles in the high-priced high rise have in effect stolen the view from residents of the Mission, Castro and Noe; I'm wondering, do any Potrero Hill residents still have their Bay Bridge view?