this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2026
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Skyscrapers operate on very different principles than a jenga tower, because you're thinking of it as one your intuition is going to be completely incorrect. It's not just a bunch of concrete blocks stacked on top of eachother, you can not build very tall using those concepts. Think of a skyscraper like a bunch of those tensegrity table things linked up to each other in an alternating/spiral configuration.^1^
A strong sideways push can break the balance and cause one floor to crash into the one below it, which breaks that central chain causing it to smash into the floor below it, etc. In order for it to "fall to the side" instead it would need to break both the center chain and at least 2 of the outer ones. You would think this means it only needs ~3x more energy is needed to tip it sideways, but you underestimate the power of leverage.
In short it needs a strong sideways push to fall down and it will collapse on itself, straight down, long before there's enough energy to cause it to "fall sideways".
^1 This comparison is only slightly more correct than the 'jenga tower' model, but I'm hoping it will help with conceptualizing and intuition. I would encourage you to look at the mathmatical models of skyscrapers, but that's left as an "Exercise for the reader"^