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. 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. Courtesy of Diane Hartley. He told LeMessurier that Citicorp Center could blow over in the wind. The BBC aired a special on the Citicorp Center crisis, and one of its viewers was Diane Hartley. According to LeMessurier, in 1978 he got a phone call from an undergraduate architecture student making a bold claim about LeMessurier’s building. In the course of writing her thesis, she had questioned LeMessurier’s calculations – triggering his reevaluation of the design. 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. 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. Author(s): Caroline Whitbeck. LeMessurier’s unflinching disclosure of the problem is today used as a case study in professional ethics. 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. Addendum: The Diane Hartley Case. 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. 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. 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! It turns out that she was the student in LeMessurier’s story. She got in touch with LeMessurier’s of ce and was reas-sured that the building was ne.