COLLAPSE OF SPACE BUILDING IN MEDELLÍN, COLOMBIA

Civil Engineering is the oldest engineering field in history just before Military

Engineering, the discipline have built several amazing structure such as the

Roman Coliseum, the Roman Aqueduct, the Great Wall of China, Burj Khalifa

building, Gotthard Base Tunnel and some others structures that you can find in any

place like highways, airports, railways, bridges etc. The develop of western culture

is highly linked with their infrastructure, that is why in our daily routine we witness

new projects to connect regions or city locations, to manage our waste and to give

new places to live like houses or apartments. This led us to realized that all this

hard work has been done to improve the quality life of society, nevertheless, just

like in other situations sometimes things do not go the way as we want and failures

comes up because of factors like natural events, corruption and the human error. A

27-story building located in Medellín, Colombia sudden collapse in 2013, it is a fact

that the reason was a human mistake but the deal is the investigations have not

concluded who is guilty, the structural design, the geotechnics studies or the

underground water studies. This essay seeks to illustrate the conclusions of the

investigation made by Universidad de los Andes whom determined the structural

design was the main cause of the collapse. Firstly, this assignment examines the

events that led to the building collapsing and its links with the conclusion that the

human error was the structural design. Next, it closely examines the arguments of

the geotechnics, water studies, quality of materials and construction labors in

relation to the main cause of the collapse. Finally, it focuses on the importance of

the structural design and how this affects the structure stability.
This first section provides a general discussion of the events that led the structure

collapsing. As we have witness watching news some structures have failed

because of structural design like Chirajara bridge or geotechnical and water issues

like Hidroituango. Either way, when a failure happens the structure many times

give us some clues before to notice that something is happening. According to

photographic reports made by workers of the project, failures were obvious, in the

stage 6 appear some cracks in the columns, beams, the slabs present severe

deflections, but the determinant factor was the settlement of one foundation pile,

the company who was in charge begin works to repair this failures but the failures

were underestimate and the building collapse the night of October 12 th 2013. This

chain of events shows the inadequate procedure that the builder company follow

and ended up with the tragedy.

Having established the events that happened before the collapse, this part of the

essay will now consider the structure design as the main cause of the building

failures. Situations like this have happened for example the Zumrut building in

Konya, Turkey. Space building would not have collapsed if the columns were have

proper dimensions, if a structural engineer take a look the structural drawings the

person would notice that the columns dimensions were not normal for a 27 story

building, in fact those dimensions would be for columns of 12 story building so they

should suspect that something was wrong and make a warning. Either way looking

the sequence of the failure was:

 a) Before the differential settlement in the foundation level, the axis R3 column

in level 5 failed in February of 2013.

b) Differential settlement appears so an intern redistribution of loads happens

and critic column of failure is the one in axis S3 which failed in October 11 th

2013.

c) Excessive differential settlement provokes other redistribution of loads to

columns around the critic column S3, the building would fail then but the

masonry walls help to hold the structure.

d) Neither the beams, slabs or columns have the capacity to hold such loads

so is inevitable that column S3 will present the failure.

e) The building collapses with the failure of column S3.

Modeling the building with the proper dimensions of columns, the probability of

collapse would be 0,1% in comparison with the probability of failure with the real

dimensions of 100%. Taking into account this evidence highlights that the main

cause was an incorrect structural design.

One aspect which illustrates that the main cause was not related to quality of

materials, soil studies, water studies or construction labors can be identified thanks

to the computer model which take into account this aspect and according to the

results those factors were not determinant to provoke a general failure, in spite of,

the structure also had problems with those aspects. In this case the soil studies

was specific with a value of diameter for the base of the piles, but, when one of

those piles was built the workers aim there was a problem with underground water
and aquifers which prevented to follow the original design so finally that originate

the differential settlement, now moving on to materials issue there was not

problems with it because the human error was taking into account in the original

models for example using the amplified factors of loads in NSR10, There is general

agreement that as has been mentioned if the columns were design properly the

settlements would not have been that much big so the main cause of collapse was

related to the structural design.

Clearly, this essay has shown that the main factors which impact upon the collapse

of Space building in Medellín and analyze each of them to determine that the main

cause of the failure was because of an incorrect structural design as a result of

computer modeling which show the probability of failure reduce from 100% to 0,1%

if the columns, beams and slabs were design properly following NSR10. This

essay presented a summary of the main events to learn and identify possible

problems in the future based on the evidence provide by situations like this one.

The engineers in Colombia must learn from this experience to avoid the repetition

of this sadly event that caused 12 deaths, we must be professionals in our labor to

build a better country.

REFERENCES

[1] FACULTAD DE INGENIERÍA UNIANDES. Octubre 3 de 2014. Concepto

técnico en relación a las causas más probables del colpaso del edifico Space.
Recuperado el 26 de junio de 2020 de
https://www.medellin.gov.co/irj/go/km/docs/pccdesign/SubportaldelCiudadano_2/Pl
andeDesarrollo_0_15/Noticias/Shared
%20Content/Documentos/2014/Uniandes_Informe-Final-Fase3-SPACE-
Resumen.pdf

[2] B. Caicedo. E. Alonso. C. Mendoza. J. Alcoverro. February 12, 2019. The

Collapse of Space Building. Recuperado el 26 de junio de 2020 de
https://www.icevirtuallibrary.com/doi/full/10.1680/jgeot.17.P.265

[3] J. Suarez. February 28, 2018. Lessons from the collapse of Space Building in
Medellín, Colombia. Recuperado el 26 de junio de 2020 de
https://www.erosion.com.co/57-ing-colombia/174-space-ing.html