Group 1 Presentation

Post war London
Housing crisis
Solution - High rise housing
 high density of occupation

Short construction time

Low cost
Pre-cast concrete

6:00am 18 th May 1968
Minor Gas explosion on 18th floor


Person still alive
Did not even damage her hearing
Two walls blown out
All the corner apartments above floor 18 collapsed onto 18th floor
Caused all floors below to collapse

Floor 18
Apartment 90
Luckily only 4 people killed
As most people were asleep in bedroom at time of incident
17 injured
The occupant of apartment 90 survived

Designed using Larson-Nielson Method
The Larsen-Nielson system was composed of factory built, pre-cast concrete components designed to minimize on-site construction work
This building system was intended for buildings with only six stories.
It had no fail-safe mechanisms.

Wind design codes were out of date with new building heights
Extremely poor construction quality

Primarily no redundancy in design

All walls load-bearing

No alternative Load Paths
Poor Workmanship
The tower block was an accident waiting to happen.

First significant instance of
“Progressive/Disproportionate Collapse”
Brought awareness of greater need for quality workmanship
The need to keep building codes up to date with new new building techniques
The dangers of over-reliance on building codes