Wind Engineering for Louisville Museum Plaza

Common reactions when one first sees an image of the Museum Plaza project planned for Louisville, Kentucky (Figure 1) are wonder, confusion, and excitement. For the structural engineer, the initial reactions tended more toward disbelief, anxiety, and even a little apprehension, and that’s just considering how to make the building stand up under gravity loads. When the design team started considering lateral forces—primarily wind forces—the building’s complexities grew tenfold. Complex building behaviors required extensive collaboration between the structural engineer and the wind tunnel laboratory to ensure that the many possible design wind load combinations were applied to the computer models such that maximum demands on the lateral system could be considered appropriately.