Would skyscrapers tip over if people fell sideways?

Suppose that for some reason gravity magically changes, but only for people. While this goes on, instead of gravity pulling people down, it pushes them East. To be clear, it's just people. Not animals, not objects, and not their buildings. People fall east, but everything else falls to Earth like normal.

My understanding of construction and materials is that there are a lot of things that can handle insane amounts of a certain type of force, from a certain direction, but change the type of force or the direction it pushes in and suddenly the material or structure falls apart like a card castle. Would this happen here?

If this happened in the middle of a normal business day at some large skyscraper, filled to the normal acceptable capacity, and then everyone inside of it suddenly started being pushed sideways instead of pulled down, would the skyscraper still stay up, or would that amount of human weight pushing it sideways be more than it could handle?

posted almost 5 years ago

Jason Clyde‭

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