Anyone here who has had to work with an architect in making a building actually happen? Only one time for me, and those guys don't know crap about the building structure or the mechanics of it running. They might come up with fancy ideas of making it look nice, but that's about it. You need OTHER experts to make it happen.
Saying an architect is an expert on structural loads and building structure etc. is like saying because I am a police officer, I am an expert on the law decisions of the US Supreme Court. Why would anyone buy that argument? They wouldn't, they would realize I had training in a specific area of law and it's enforcement, but NOT the training in other aspects of the law and interpreting it that a Supreme Court justice does.
Exactly - the process works like this: Architect creates a conceptual design of a building - what it will look like, sometimes floor plans, some exterior aesthetics issues, etc.
He then sends that design to an Engineer (this usually happens either between two firms, and Architecture Firm and an Engineering Firm or a consolidated A/E firm). First stop is the Structural Engineer. He takes the conceptual design and creates a skeleton, then passes off to the Mechanical and Electrical guys to size and design the Electrical and HVAC systems. Then through a series of Design reviews with the Owner, Architect, Engineers, and other interested parties, they iterate the design down to the final plans and it is built. That is of course a VERY loose interpretation and pretty simplified, with the creation of Design Build and other cool construction methods, but that's the jist. The bottom line is that the guy who says what a building LOOKS like and the guy who designs it are two different people.
So basically the point is that this 1000 people number need to be cut down to ONLY those with the authority to comment, then let's see how many and compare that to the total number in the country.
Until the leading organization for structural engineers comes out and says that there are some errors in the official report, I'm not buying the story.
Yep, ASCE has stated their opinion years ago and they found that it was the fire and the planes. Nothing else. Until they retract their official opinion, I probably wont' change mine, simply because they are the experts. Those guys are by far, the smartest in the country....as I said, they teach the rest of of how to be structural engineers.
Here's my other problem with the doubts to the Official Story....
If it WASN'T the planes and the fire, I have yet to see a convincing story as to what actually DID cause the buildings to collapse. A controlled detonation just isn't feasable. The amount of explosive needed to bring those things down is huge and would have been noticed. It is true that a single support will take down the buliding, but the collapse would have looked MUCH different. you would need charges on EACH of the primary supports and have the buliding wired going up the supports as well to make them fall how they did. the only way to make them come straight down like that is from a vertical load. Exactly what happened when the heat made the steel reach its yield point and caused each floor to progressively collapse, increasing the dead load on the floor below and causing catastrophic failure. Present a BETTER argument, not simply holes in what is out there and I'll believe it.
I have no doubt that there are holes and unexplained portions of the official story, but with an event this big and very little way to investigate after the fact, that is to be assumed. I just have a hard time believing this stuff when all I've seen are doubts and no better explanations!
