Curved skyscraper focuses sunlight and melts cars, Why Japanese hospitals don't have a 4th or 9th floor, Citigroup Center skyscraper collapse averted by student's phone call. He told LeMessurier that Citicorp Center could blow over in the wind. She got in touch with LeMessurier’s of ce and was reas-sured that the building was ne. The 59-storey Citigroup Center was erected on top of four stilts in 1977 to avoid an historic church below, but Diane Hartley's call to engineer William LeMessurier to query whether a hurricane could collapse the building resulted in an emergency redesign to tackle the flaw she highlighted. Part of history: This is Diane Hartley - who is now a real estate consultant in Washington D.C. - who helped discover the massive flaw in the Citigroup Center He contemplated suicide. In the course of writing her thesis, she had questioned LeMessurier’s calculations – triggering his reevaluation of the design. Addendum: The Diane Hartley Case. Author(s): Caroline Whitbeck. LeMessurier’s unflinching disclosure of the problem is today used as a case study in professional ethics. Diane Hartley As for LeMessurier, the executives at Citicorp asked no more than the $2 million his insurance policy covered, despite the fact that the repairs alone cost over $8 million. It turns out that she was the student in LeMessurier’s story. The problem was discovered in 1978, when structural engineer William LeMussurier’s staff had a discussion with a Princeton University civil engineering student named Diane Hartley. But word of Hartley’s inquiry got back to LeMessurier, and he de- Disaster was averted when an undergraduate telephoned the designer of a Manhattan skyscraper to highlight a construction flaw: The joints in the chevrons were bolts, not welds. The 59-storey Citigroup Center was erected on top of four stilts in 1977 to avoid an historic church below, but Diane Hartley's call to engineer William LeMessurier to query whether a hurricane could collapse the building resulted in an emergency redesign to tackle the flaw she highlighted. It is generally thought that his forthrightness so impressed the executives that they decided to keep their lawyers at bay. Diane Hartley, a Princeton engineering student, was the hero in this drama. University engineering student Diane Hartley wrote an un-dergraduate thesis challenging how well the building would do facing quartering winds, the winds that strike a building on its corners. Citigroup Center in New York was erected on stilts to avoid the church below, Hotel Ascher Wildkirchli: A truly wild mountain experienceÂ, "Wood" you believe it? The BBC aired a special on the Citicorp Center crisis, and one of its viewers was Diane Hartley. Courtesy of Diane Hartley. In 1978 Diane Hartley was an engineering student at Princeton, studying with David Billington who was offering a course on structures and their scientific, social, and symbolic implications (subsequently titled, “Structure and the Urban Environment”). The world's oldest wood building has 1,400 years of age, A building higher than three times Titanic's length, International Shanghai Hotel, innovation taken to new and fantastic lows, Liebian International building boasts a waterfall, Thames Barrier against tide flooding in London, Oops! According to LeMessurier, in 1978 he got a phone call from an undergraduate architecture student making a bold claim about LeMessurier’s building.