Untitled Document

The Citicorp Building

The Citicorp Building was built on land owned by a church. Citicorp was allowed to erect its headquarters there only if it agreed to build a new church on one corner of the property. The ingenious engineering solution devised to meet this condition was to place the building on huge column-like stilts located in the middles of its four sides and to cantilever one corner of the building out over the new church. All seemed well until two years after the building was put in service, when a telephone inquiry to the building's renowned structural engineer, William LeMessurier (hereafter: WL), from an engineering student, prompted WL to revisit his calculations for the building's bracing system against quartering winds. (Quartering winds are winds that hit the building not perpendicularly but at a 45 degree angle.)

To his surprise, WL found that there were problems with his initial structural analysis of the building. Eventually, he concluded that the building was vulnerable to being toppled by a “16-year wind,” i.e., one likely to occur in N.Y.C. once every 16 years ! Once he recognized the nature of the problem and the risk and probability involved, WL informed Citicorp and N.Y.C. authorities and persuaded them to allow him to launch an emergency retrofitting program to strengthen the building's 200 joints with 2”-thick steel plates. The emergency work was half finished when a major storm approached the east coast in late August, 1978. Fortunately, before it reached N.Y.C., it turned east and veered out to sea. Thus did WL avoid the toppling by strong winds of the 915-foot-tall building he designed, with the devastating destruction of humans and property that would have resulted.

WL fulfilled his moral responsibility to prevent harm by devising a reinforcement plan, disclosing the building's vulnerability to the owner and public authorities, and persuading them to implement his plan. However, to understand what gave rise to the emergency we must consider WL's method of structural analysis and the operation of his consulting firm .

To shed light on what went wrong with WL's original structural analysis, recall Kuhn's famous notion of paradigm . He argued that at a given point in time in any mature field of science virtually all of its practitioners share a certain set of fundamental assumptions, core beliefs, and epistemological commitments. Kuhn referred to the “disciplinary matrix” of assumptions that most practitioners in a mature field of science hold at a given point in time as the dominant “paradigm ” in the field at that juncture. Practitioners are socialized into subscribing to this paradigm while graduate students, partly through the field's textbooks. Subscribers to the dominant paradigm feel impelled to employ certain consensually agreed upon methods in their work, to follow certain consensually agreed upon rules of procedure, and to explore and explain only certain consensually agreed upon phenomena. In short, the dominant paradigm of a field exerts a subtle but powerful guiding or regulatory influence on ‘the what' and ‘the how' --i.e., the substance and the manner -- of the practice of science in that field .

In recent years, scholars have adapted and applied Kuhn's ideas about the role and functioning of paradigms to the study of technology and technological change. It is now argued that at a given point of time, the activity surrounding a particular mature technology proceeds under the auspices of a dominant paradigm, i.e., a set of assumptions to which most if not all people working on that technology subscribe. A technology's paradigm comprises assumptions about the following:

• the appropriate configuration of the device or system in question;

• the principle of operation that underlies its functioning;

• the material or materials of which the technology is made;

• the processes and methods by which the technology is designed, made, and operated; and

• the standard uses to which the technology is properly and fruitfully put.

Dominant paradigms exert subtle but powerful conservative influence on technologists and engineers who subscribe to them. Moreover, as with scientists, technologists and engineers can be not only benefited but also betrayed by their paradigm adherence. How can paradigm adherence be problematic?

Technology paradigm adherence can go wrong in two ways: (i) if paradigm adherents are unable to see or accept fruitful new uses of a technology or new and better methods of doing things compared to how they are currently being done; and (ii) if paradigm adherents wrongly assume that a technological design or methodological approach that is appropriate for situations falling inside its established domain of use is also warranted for a situation that proves to be outside that domain . In short, uncritical or rigid paradigm adherence can go wrong by fostering undershooting or overshooting of the proper domain of use and application of the technology or analytical methods in question.

WL, it turns out, had succumbed to paradigm overshooting . He wrongly assumed that the mode of analysis long taught in graduate school structural engineering courses for analyzing the forces of quartering winds on high-rise buildings whose columns are at the four corners , was also appropriate for the analysis of such forces in buildings whose columns are at the midpoints of its four sides. As WL acknowledged later in an interview, he had unwittingly extended the paradigmatic method of structural analysis beyond its legitimate domain of application and into a new domain where it did not apply, one that included his innovative building.