If all goes as planned, the growing season for lettuce and herbs will begin before year-end in a 69,000-sq-ft converted steel plant in Newark, N.J.Crews are transforming the plant into a $30-million vertical farm. The team includes the grower AeroFarms, which will be headquartered there, and the building owner-developer, RBH Group.When completed, AeroFarms will have the capacity to grow up to 2 million lb per year of baby leaf greens and herbs in an environmentally controlled, safe and sanitary facility, says AeroFarms, which hopes to create a model for sustainable indoor farming.Annual production per sq ft will be 75 times
There had been a magnificent palace next to the River Spree in central Berlin since the 15th century, apart from a few decades after World War II. With the recent topping out of a huge concrete structure on the same site, a Baroque-style replica is taking shape in the German capital, but the project still needs $30 million more for the facade.After some 27 months of work, Hochtief Solutions A.G., Hannover, finished the structure of the emerging Berlin Palace–Humboldtforum on June 12, formally completing its $53-million core-and-shell contract on time and on budget, says Bernd Pütter, Hochtief’s chief spokesman.With 100,000
Related Links: Record-Size Swimming Pools Come to the U.S. for the First Time A Closer Look at Record-Sized Pools That Resemble Oases The aquarium business "is dependent on the engineering challenges of containing water and resisting corrosion of materials; longevity; and low maintenance,” says Peter Chermayeff, an architect who has been designing major aquariums around the world for over 50 years.Aquariums—for which ENR has compiled a list at left of the world's largest—are typically built by general contractors with experience in the water and wastewater sectors. One example is Brasfield & Gorrie. The contractor's first fish habitat was Atlanta's Georgia
Related Links: DeSimone Consulting Engineers Bjarke Ingels Group Getting into a construction groove at the Grove at Grand Bay in Miami was not easy, due to the drastic and sundry twists of the 21-story towers. Getting the gravity- defying concrete structures to twist without falling over also was tricky.The two residential towers in Coconut Grove were angled and eccentrically shaped by Bjarke Ingels Group, with Nichols, Brosch, Wurst, Wolfe + Associates, to optimize views of Biscayne Bay.Set for completion in October, the buildings face each other like a couple dancing the twist. Each has rounded exposed perimeter columns that slant
By Nadine M. Post/ENR Wood proponents have proposed code changes that would allow residential buildings with heavy-timber structures to be nine stories and 100 ft tall. The American Wood Council, on a roll after it succeeded in getting new provisions into the 2015 International Building Code that allow heavy-timber structure within exterior walls, is proposing even bigger changes for the 2018 IBC, currently under development. The proposal would allow two- or three-hour-rated heavy timber to “safely serve in diverse structures” as tall as 100 ft, said Paul D. Coats, Southeast regional manager for the American Wood Council (AWC), at the
Photo courtesy of EarthCam Stadium-bowl concrete work, two-thirds complete, is expected to be done by the fall. Related Links: New Atlanta Falcons Stadium Design More Than a Box With a Lid Concrete work on the New Atlanta Stadium for football’s Atlanta Falcons is two-thirds complete and expected to be done this fall, says Wayne E. Wadsworth, principal in charge for the stadium’s general contractor, the Holder-Hunt-Russell-Moody Joint Venture, which holds a $1.078-billion guaranteed maximum price contract.For the structural concrete bowl, the work is all about the megacolumns that will support the structural steel for the signature kinetic roof, says Wadsworth.
By Nadine M. Post/ENR Crews and a crane coax an 11th-floor module into place for the delayed 32-story B2 BKLYN residential building. Work got underway again on April 24, after an eight-month hiatus. Related Links: Skanska, Forest City Ratner Sue Each Other Over World's Future Tallest Modular Building After an eight-month construction hiatus triggered by delivery and fit-up difficulties at the modular plant, crews once again are installing modules on the future 322-ft-tall B2 BKLYN in New York City, which, if completed next year as now planned, will rank as the world’s tallest volumetric modular building. The record holder for
Related Links: Danger: Railroad CrossingBuilding Manhattan's Hudson Yards Construction Begins on Hudson Yards' $700M Eastern Platform NYC Hudson Yards Developers Name Tutor Perini as Contractor, Form JV with Tishman Structural engineer Thomas Z. Scarangello is no stranger to the Long Island Railroad's West Side Yard in Manhattan, which is going under cover thanks to the 28-acre Hudson Yards development.The current chairman and CEO of Thornton Tomasetti (TT) first studied the yard in the late 1990s, when there was talk of a baseball park there. And he was involved again when New York City made its bid for the 2012 Olympic
Construction begins on Hudson Yards' $700-million Eastern Platform NYC Hudson Yards Developers Name Tutor Perini as Contractor, Form JV with Tishman Rolling trains underfoot. Around-the-clock operations. Caissons needled in between tracks. Hundreds of work-arounds to avoid tunnels and buried utilities. Track-outage hopscotch. Two-hour work windows. Sudden schedule changes. Constant scrutiny. Deadline pressure.The 11.2-million-sq-ft first phase of Manhattan's 17.4-million-sq-ft Hudson Yards—a 28-acre minicity on
Related Links: Skills Shortage Challenges New Zealand Earthquake Rebuild Teams Mobilize to Rescue Survivors, Assess Damage in Nepal Seismic researchers say they have found a number of worrying anomalies in how mid-rise and high-rise buildings with reinforced concrete frames behaved during the 2010 and 2011 earthquakes near Christchurch, New Zealand.“Many plastic hinge zones in reinforced concrete beams of multistory buildings performed unexpectedly,” says Charles Clifton, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Auckland. “It was seen that a few wide cracks developed, rather than the expected large number of hairline cracks.” As a result, the embedded