56 Leonard Street

New York City, USA

 160-tonne Tuned Sloshing Damper 

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A 57-story skyscraper in Manhattan, 56 Leonard Street features striking cantilevered blocks that its architects, Herzog & de Meuron, have described as “stacked houses in the sky.” We designed a tuned sloshing damper for the building that contains 160 tonnes of water. The damper’s tank is longer on one dimension than the other, allowing us to tune it at two different frequencies in the two orthogonal directions. In order to ensure that the damper effectively removes energy from the structural system – as opposed to letting energy resonate back down into the building – paddles are installed inside the tank to create turbulence. When the water moves across the paddles and becomes turbulent, the energy is turned into heat, which simply dissipates into the water.