Abstract:
Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. As men moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there. They said to each other, "Come, let's make bricks and bake them thoroughly." They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. Then they said, "Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth." But the LORD came down to see the city and the tower that the men were building. The LORD said, "If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other." So the LORD scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city.1 —Genesis 11:4–9(New International Version 1973) In story, people gave up building the tower of babel because the Lord confused their language. In reality, there are much more barriers to construct a skyscraper, such as structure failure, earthquake or even wind.2 In recent decades, engineers have developed a solution called Tuned Mass Damper, which is a passive control device mounted in the top of the building structure to response the amplitude of mechanical vibrations due to wind or an earthquake.3 This new invention strongly increased the odds of survival when the skyscraper was facing some serious natural disasters. However, the Tuned Mass Damper usually takes a lot of space of the building, especially for the most valuable areas. This thesis topic of “New Tuned Mass Damper: Façade Damper” is aimed to find a solution to save space of the skyscrapers based on the idea of tuned mass damper and in the meantime, to transform the tuned mass damper from an engineering device to an architectural aspect.