this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2025
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Mildly Interesting

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BOK Tower (originally One Williams Center) was constructed in 1976 for The Williams Companies Inc. a petroleum producer in Tulsa, Oklahoma. John Williams, the CEO at the time, liked the look of the recently completed World Trade Center so much that he hired the original architect to build essentially a half-scale version of WTC Tower 1.

The lobby even has marble walls and wall hanginga similar to the old World Trade Center.

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[–] MotoAsh@lemmy.world 8 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Hopefully they used a slightly different literal design, because the WTC had serious design flaws that allowed it to fall as it did.

Basically, it's columns along the outside held together only by the floors' structure themselves. So when a plane took out a bunch of floors and the fire weakened more, there was suddenly an entire middle section that didn't have any lateral support. This allowed the colimns along those sections to accordion in/out to begin the fall. Since buildings aren't made to have dynamic forces of the scale of the entire freaking building's weight, that made even the structurally sound sections fail on impact as the upper floors came down ontop of them, etc.

There were also compounding construction issues, as the fire resistant coating was supposed to be sprayed directly on to the steel floor beams up to a minimum depth, but investigations even before the collapse showed the builders were lazy fucks and just sprayed large sections from one vantage point, leaving some areas thinner or not covered at all.

If they used a similar design, something as simple as a typical fire could cause the whole thing to collapse.