Citicorp Tower, New York City, NY, USA

Abstract

Citicorp Center building is a 59-story, mid-Manhattan tower well known for its unique urban form. The building is supported by four, nine-story columns located on the center points of the lot lines, rather than the corners that define the block that it occupies. This peculiarity is a result of the deal that the owners had to strike in order to purchase the air rights of the church, which still occupies one of the corners of the site. It was this unique form that caused a series of events, which eventually lead the principal design engineer of the building to discover a major structural flaw. The discovery was surrounded by a certain drama highlighting important professional and DAV issues.

Exercise 16

Use one or more of the tables included in the Appendix section (captions listed below) to conduct a partial DAV analysis of the case study provided in this chapter. Did the value adding features contribute to cost, schedule, or quality of the product positively or negatively? What could or should have been done to realize the full benefit of the value added by the special features of this design?

Table A.1: Building facts

Table A.2: Stakeholders

Table A.3: Design features

Table A.4: Timeline

Table A.5: Estimated ordinal values for stakeholder benefits

Table A.6: Estimated NPV for feature; Energy Savings

Table A.7: Estimated NPV for feature; Structural System

Table A.8: Calculation of net present value of a double-skin Facade

Table A.9: AHP ranking matrix technique applied to similar buildings

Table A.10: Benchmarking of N-number of comparable buildings

The information provided about this case is at best limited. Feel free to collect additional information to undertake a complete analysis and make necessary assumptions. Some resources to help you get started include the following:

• Brady S (2015) Citicorp center tower: how failure was averted. Engineer’s Journal.

• Werner J (2014) The design flaw that almost wiped out an NYC skyscraper. Slate.

• Morgenster J (1995) The fifty-nine-story crisis. The New Yorker, pp. 45–53.

• Delatte NJ (2009) Beyond failure: forensic case studies for civil engineers. ACSE Press. p. 340.