The World Trade Center in New York City collapsed on September 11, 2001, as result of the al-Qaeda attacks. Two commercial airliners hijacked by al-Qaeda terrorists were deliberately flown into the Twin Towers of the complex, resulting in a total progressive collapse that killed almost 3,000 people. It is the deadliest and most costly building collapse in history.
A tenement is a type of building shared by multiple dwellings, typically with flats or apartments on each floor and with shared entrance stairway access. They are common on the British Isles, particularly in Scotland. In the medieval Old Town, in Edinburgh, tenements were developed with each apartment treated as a separate house, built on top of each other. Over hundreds of years, custom grew to become law concerning maintenance and repairs, as first formally discussed in Stair's 1681 writings on Scots property law. In Scotland, these are now governed by the Tenements Act, which replaced the old Law of the Tenement and created a new system of common ownership and procedures concerning repairs and maintenance of tenements. Tenements with one or two room flats provided popular rented accommodation for workers, but in some inner-city areas, overcrowding and maintenance problems led to shanty towns, which have been cleared and redeveloped. In more affluent areas, tenement flats form spacious privately owned houses, some with up to six bedrooms, which continue to be desirable properties.
A fire escape is a special kind of emergency exit, usually mounted to the outside of a building – occasionally inside, but separate from the main areas of the building. It provides a method of escape in the event of a fire or other emergency that makes the stairwells inside a building inaccessible. Fire escapes are most often found on multiple-story residential buildings, such as apartment buildings.
"The Show Must Go On" is the 22nd and final episode of the eleventh season, and the 245th episode overall, of the American television series ER. Written by David Zabel and directed by John Wells, the episode originally aired on NBC on May 19, 2005.
Marina City is a mixed-use residential-commercial building complex in Chicago, Illinois, United States, North America, designed by architect Bertrand Goldberg. The multi-building complex opened between 1963 and 1967 and occupies almost an entire city block on State Street on the north bank of the Chicago River on the Near North Side, directly across from the Loop. Portions of the complex were designated a Chicago Landmark in 2016. The towers' symbolic similarity to rural Illinois corncobs has often been noted in media.
A three-decker, triple-decker triplex or stacked triplex, in the United States, is a three-story (triplex) apartment building. These buildings are typically of light-framed, wood construction, where each floor usually consists of a single apartment, and frequently, originally, extended families lived in two, or all three floors. Both stand-alone and semi-detached versions are common.
Multifamily residential, also known as multidwelling unit (MDU)) is a classification of housing where multiple separate housing units for residential inhabitants are contained within one building or several buildings within one complex. Units can be next to each other (side-by-side units), or stacked on top of each other (top and bottom units). Common forms include apartment building and condominium, where typically the units are owned individually rather than leased from a single building owner. Many intentional communities incorporate multifamily residences, such as in cohousing projects.
Cables Wynd House, better known as the Leith Banana Flats or the Banana Block because of its curved shape, is a nine-storey local authority housing block in Leith, Edinburgh. The building, in fact, has ten storeys. The ground floor is called Cables Wynd and the nine floors above constitute Cables Wynd House. This often leads to confusion in postal and other services.
The E2 nightclub stampede occurred on February 17, 2003, at the E2 nightclub above the Epitome restaurant at 2347 South Michigan Avenue in the South Loop neighborhood of Chicago, Illinois, in which 21 people died and more than 50 were injured when panic ensued from the use of pepper spray by a security guard to break up a fight. The club's owners were convicted of criminal contempt for their persistent failure to keep the facility up to code, and sentenced to two years probation.
Porch collapse or balcony collapse is a phenomenon typically associated with older or poorly constructed multi-storey apartment buildings that have wooden porch extensions on the front or rear of the building. The collapses have a number of causes, including overloading due to excessive weight from overoccupancy. Overoccupancy can result from guests filling a porch at a party, from people seeking cooler breezes during a heat wave, or from people filling a porch while seeking shelter from the rain. It may be from the weight of furniture/appliances, wading pools, or air conditioner compressors. After years of rain and snow, it may be from rotted wood, soil subsidence under the porch foundation, rust of nails and fasteners, and not being built to specifications required by modern-day building codes. Many older porches were built before codes required them to be able to support a legally mandated load of so many pounds per square foot or metre, and porches are often not as sturdily built as interior structures. The phenomenon is associated with older or poorly constructed multistorey apartment buildings with wooden porches. Architect Stanley Tigerman said that in New York City one finds steel fire escapes, but in Chicago, the distance to alleys behind multistorey brick buildings encouraged the construction of wooden multistorey porches.
The Emil Bach House is a Prairie style house in the Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago, Illinois, United States that was designed by architect Frank Lloyd Wright. The house was built in 1915 for an admirer of Wright's work, Emil Bach, the co-owner of the Bach Brick Company. The house is representative of Wright's late Prairie style and is an expression of his creativity from a period just before his work shifted stylistic focus. The Bach House was declared a Chicago Landmark on September 28, 1977, and was added to the U.S. National Register of Historic Places on January 23, 1979.
The George W. Furbeck House is a house located in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park. The house was designed by famous American architect Frank Lloyd Wright in 1897 and constructed for Chicago electrical contractor George W. Furbeck and his new bride Sue Allin Harrington. The home's interior is much as it appeared when the house was completed but the exterior has seen some alteration. The house is an important example of Frank Lloyd Wright's transitional period of the late 1890s which culminated with the birth of the first fully mature early modern Prairie style house. The Furbeck House was listed as a contributing property to a U.S. federal Registered Historic District in 1973 and declared a local Oak Park Landmark in 2002.
Vi Daley was an alderman in the Chicago City Council, representing Chicago's 43rd ward. The 43rd ward includes much of the Lincoln Park and a small portions of the Near North Side Community areas. Daley was elected to three four-year terms, and chose not to seek reelection when her last term ended in 2011.
The George W. Loomer House is a private residence located at 71 West Hancock Street in Midtown Detroit, Michigan. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1994.
On June 29, 1995, the Sampoong Department Store in Seoul, South Korea, collapsed due to a structural failure. The collapse killed 502 people and injured 937, making it the largest peacetime disaster in South Korean history. It was the deadliest non-deliberate modern building collapse until the 2013 Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh.
Structural integrity and failure is an aspect of engineering that deals with the ability of a structure to support a designed structural load without breaking and includes the study of past structural failures in order to prevent failures in future designs.
The Dar es Salaam building collapse occurred during the early hours of Good Friday on 29 March 2013 when a 16-floor residential apartment building collapsed on a nearby mosque compound, killing 36 people and trapping over 60 under the rubble.
On 4 April 2013, a building collapsed on tribal land in Mumbra, a suburb of Thane in Maharashtra, India. It has been called the worst building collapse in the area. Seventy-four people were killed, while more than 100 survived. The search for additional survivors ended on 6 April 2013.
On June 16, 2015, shortly after midnight, five Irish J-1 visa students and one Irish-American died and seven others were injured after a balcony on which they were standing collapsed. The group was celebrating a 21st birthday party in Berkeley, California. The balcony was on the 5th floor of an apartment building at 2020 Kittredge Street in Berkeley, then called Library Gardens. The district attorney of Alameda County launched a criminal probe into the incident. In January 2022, one of the injured died from a stroke related to the injuries.
