They're adding a hunch of floors to an existing building - it was the old Pfizer headquarters and they want to turn it into apartments. Someone either didn't do the proper engineering study, or the original specs weren't accurate.
Figuring out who to blame will probably take years in court.
I'm not an expert but those look like pretty wimpy columns? Kind of surprising, when I worked in a tower it had exposed concrete columns that were very thick in comparison
Most likely the building gets stabilized and then anyone involved gets embroiled in lawsuits and it stays standing half finished for years. One Seaport is a famous recent example of an under construction skyscraper getting halted for structural issues. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/161_Maiden_Lane
Tie every helicopter you can find to the roof, gas the bent bit off, haul it away and drop it somewhere?
They'll likely shore it up with hydraulic props - probably going through the floor and ceiling to floor slabs above and below - to stabilise it, and then start demolishing the building bit by bit.
Given all the bad press around things like the millennium tower, I think once you have an issue like this, the building is done. No one will want to live there. And given structural problems with load bearing beams, I would expect the building has to be demolished. But maybe they can demolish it top down partially and rebuild up from the compromised area if the city and engineers deem that safe.
Knocking down a building like this will be a huge pain, extremely expensive, and very dangerous. I think you can assume the developers will try desperately to retrofit the building before demo. There’s good precedence for this even in New York City. Look into the Citicorp case study.
The USA is mostly empty space. Trying to force upwards in such an already dense area just doesn't make sense. We are not constrained the way singapore is.
They're adding a hunch of floors to an existing building - it was the old Pfizer headquarters and they want to turn it into apartments. Someone either didn't do the proper engineering study, or the original specs weren't accurate.
Figuring out who to blame will probably take years in court.
This is a little pedantic but the pictures seem to show failing support columns not beams.
Beams are horizontal and columns are vertical.
Having seen the photos, I simply can't imagine how can they recover from that.
I'm not an expert but those look like pretty wimpy columns? Kind of surprising, when I worked in a tower it had exposed concrete columns that were very thick in comparison
I think the first picture is not showing structural columns: they're more a symptom (buckling as the building is moving) as opposed to the cause.
Does anyone here have any knowledge of how something like this gets resolved?
Most likely the building gets stabilized and then anyone involved gets embroiled in lawsuits and it stays standing half finished for years. One Seaport is a famous recent example of an under construction skyscraper getting halted for structural issues. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/161_Maiden_Lane
Yes, sometimes gravity resolves the problem for you.
Tie every helicopter you can find to the roof, gas the bent bit off, haul it away and drop it somewhere?
They'll likely shore it up with hydraulic props - probably going through the floor and ceiling to floor slabs above and below - to stabilise it, and then start demolishing the building bit by bit.
When you run the mental model of picking up a building with a bunch of surplus Hueys, do they not all collide together once they start bearing weight?
Not if you make the strings different lengths.
Given all the bad press around things like the millennium tower, I think once you have an issue like this, the building is done. No one will want to live there. And given structural problems with load bearing beams, I would expect the building has to be demolished. But maybe they can demolish it top down partially and rebuild up from the compromised area if the city and engineers deem that safe.
Knocking down a building like this will be a huge pain, extremely expensive, and very dangerous. I think you can assume the developers will try desperately to retrofit the building before demo. There’s good precedence for this even in New York City. Look into the Citicorp case study.
The USA is mostly empty space. Trying to force upwards in such an already dense area just doesn't make sense. We are not constrained the way singapore is.
NYT updates (non-paywall) https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/07/07/nyregion/pfizer-buil...