June 2018
Intermediate to advanced
304 pages
8h 29m
English
The other day, I was standing in downtown Mexico admiring one of the city’s greatest landmarks, the Torre Latinoamericana, a 44-story skyscraper built in 1956. It’s considered an engineering marvel since it’s built on very active seismic land. The building’s designer, Dr. Leonardo Zeevaert, experienced his creation’s performance firsthand during the massive 8.1-scale earthquake that struck the city on September 19, 1985. From his vantage point in his office on the twenty-fifth floor, he witnessed hundreds of buildings collapsing all around the tower.
The building is notable as what might be called a majestic monolith, an extraordinary example of a large, complex, and durable self-contained system. David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) has ...