A Sky-Scraper.

South Canterbury Times, Issue 2817, 20 June 1900, Page 3

A Sky-Scraper.

I The building of a modern sky-scraper is a mighty task, fall of difficult problems, more difficult even than those connected with a great steamship, a great bridge, or even a railroad line. Knowing how far tbe building is going up, the architect must determine from the character of the ground on which it is to stand how far it must go down. In New York many of the greatest buildings have foundations so deep that they rest on the solid rock 75fd below the surface, and there are two or three storeys beneath the street, as well as twenty or thirty above. In Chicago all the great buildings rest on what may reasonably be called flat-boats. Indeed. Chicago is a floating city—floating on a bed of soft sand and mud. These boats are made of great timbers, driven straight down, or else of steel rails or steel girders laid criss-cross and filled in with cement until they form a great solid slab of iron and stone. And, as might be expected, these boats frequently tip a little to one side, so that many of the great skyscrapers are slightly out of plumb, like modern towers of Pisa, although they do not lean enough to be at all dangerous. 1 remember distinctly how a keen-eyed newspaper man made the discovery that one of the most famous sky-scrapers in the world—and one of the largest—was out of plumb. He was in the sixteenth storey of a building across the street, The doctor who occupied the room had tied a weight to a window cord in order to keep the shade well down, thus making it a plumb-bob. It so happened that the newspaper man glanced along this cord and across the street to the corner of the great building opposite. At first he couldn’t believe his eyes; the cord was certainly plumb, or else all the school-books were incorrect, therefore the building must certainly be leaning to one side. He called several friends, and each of them bore him out in his observations. He rushed off in great feather, secured an engineer, and had careful measurements taken. The building was found to lean 9in to the eastward at the top, and there was a news “heat” in one of the newspapers the next morning.

All the great buildings are expected to settle, and the main effort is to make this settlement uniform throughout. In New York the tall bnildings which rest on a foundation of fine wet sand have all settled from one-quarter to nine-six-teenths of an inch. The Marquette Building, Chicago, and the St. Paul Building, New Y’ork, have provision made at the bases of their columns for lifting them up with powerful hydraulic presses and inserting packing of steel should they settle too much.