| Catalog Description |
| Lecture: One hour of seminar per week. Notes:Course may be repeated for credit as topic varies. Section 1-2 will be graded on a letter-grade basis. Section 3-4 to be graded on a passed/not passed basis. |
| The Berkeley Seminar Program has been designed to provide new students with the oportunity to explore an intellectual topic with a faculty member in a small seminar setting. Berkeley seminars are offered in all campus departments, and topics vary from department to department and semester to semester. |
| Catalog Description |
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The course is a P/NP, one-unit course open to all Freshman students of the University of California, Berkeley. The faculty teaching this course is Professor Abolhassan Astaneh-Asl |
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This seminar discusses skyscrapers first: how they are designed and constructed; what motivates us to build them; and who designs and constructs them. Then for the remainder of the semester we will focus on the World Trade Center. Topics will include the initial design and construction of the World Trade Center, the 1993 unsuccessful terrorist attacks on it, and the attacks in 2001 that resulted in the tragic collapse of the towers and the loss of lives of more than 3000 innocent people. Finally, the plans for rebuilding the World Trade Center will be presented. Although the focus of the course is on design and construction aspects of skyscrapers and the World Trade Center, other aspects such as economical, political, social and historical issues will not be excluded from the discussion. The students are expected to participate in classroom discussions and select a topic related to the course title and prepare and submit a three-to-five-page term report on the subject. |
| Professor Astaneh is a member of the faculty in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. His area of specialty is behavior and design of structures to withstand gravity, seismic and blast loads. He has conducted several major research and design projects on long span bridges and tall buildings. He teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in structural engineering. A few days after the September 11th tragedies, armed with a grant from the federal National Science Foundation, he traveled to New York and for several weeks conducted field investigation of the collapsed towers of the World Trade Center. He is currently continuing his studies of the World Trade Center collapse to learn from this tragedy as much as possible. It is hoped that the lessons learned can be applied in design of other skyscrapers to prevent their catastrophic collapse in the event of future attack and to save lives. |
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Sponsoring Department: Civil & Environmental Engineering Instructor: A. Astaneh |