Arthur Gensler, the architect of Shanghai Tower, on its way up to 632 meters, refers to the 5.5-million-sq-ft supertower as a vertical city. The tower is designed as a series of stacked, 14-story communities, separated by podiums, or town squares, filled with coffee shops and other amenities. Taken to a greater extreme, a vertical city’s hamlets could have doctors’ offices, schools, clothing shops, movie theaters, grocery stores, restaurants, cobblers, a post office, bookstores and more. The idea is to mass each supertall building into discrete blocks of occupancies, whether office, hotel or housing, with each block virtually self-sufficient. The elevator
This past year has been a tough one for U.S. construction, with the value of new project starts down by a quarter from 2008 and industry unemployment standing at 19.4%. Still, that amounts to $419 billion in starts, and nearly six million people working on meaningful projects. Many more will be needed soon. All recessions eventually end, and when this one does, the industry must once again struggle with the issue of how to attract people into construction and keep them there in rewarding careers. Photo: Alissa Hollimon Submitted by: Jen Jonas, Zachry Holdings Inc., San Antonio, Texas Manuel Anselmo-Arroyo
Some big banks that received huge federal government bailouts have been paying the money back, largely to escape the increased federal scrutiny of operations and restrictions on executive pay and bonuses that the government imposed. In December alone, Bank of America paid back $45 billion, CitiGroup agreed to repay $20 billion, and Wells Fargo Bank said it would redeem $25 billion of preferred stock issued to the U.S. Treasury to cover the bank’s “toxic” assets. So far, more than 50 of the 737 institutions that received funds have squared the books. Rather than signaling a turnaround of fortunes in the
Some older American cities are sick and dying. Often strategically located along waterways and important transportation infrastructure, they evolved over centuries to support U.S. heavy industry, which largely has disappeared. Also disappearing with those businesses were jobs, opportunities and people. But they left behind the wreckage of residential, commercial and industrial structures that no longer have a purpose. Cities like Cleveland, Detroit, Baltimore and Camden are struggling to reinvent themselves and start anew, but they are burdened with thousands of abandoned or deteriorated structures that breed crime, drugs and violence and form a barrier to progress. The opportunity for such
Don Resio, a senior technologist at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Engineering Research and Development Center, Vicksburg, Miss., had an “Aha!” moment in 2008 when he conceived of a way to plug roaring levee breaches using fabric tubes partially filled with water. Tested at 1:4 scale on a real breach, the device rolled into place with the water current and sealed the gap in 12 seconds. Resio believes the principals are completely scalable, and the only thing needed to plug larger breaches, like the typical 40-ft to 60-ft levee gaps in a Mississippi flood, is a larger fabric sack
The fast rise of green construction technology is encouraging, particularly during this time of economic uncertainty. Green projects—mostly in the form of energy-efficiency building retrofits—lately have been working their way into the market as funds for new projects have evaporated in the credit crisis. However, many of these systems are not performing as touted, especially cleverly hyped geothermal heating systems that are plagued with inflated savings claims and deficient designs. These deficiencies have been slowing acceptance of a basically sound and environmentally sensitive approach to design and construction. Photo: Stantec Related Links: As More Buildings Go Geothermal, Project Teams Are
Logic and the construction industry do not always go hand in hand, so the industry, regulators and government officials often jump in to set limits on what a project owner and its design and construction teams can do on a project for the safety and health of the community, project and environment. Many teams complain and chafe under these restrictions but do little more. The best way to come out ahead in the long run is to step out front and lead the way with innovative ideas to make projects better and, at the same time, duck the threat of
These are scary times, and for those citizens living in earthquake country, the times are not just scary, they are terrifying. For starters, a major earthquake is overdue along the Hayward Fault, in the East Bay area near San Francisco: It could happen at any moment. San Francisco has 120,000 buildings, at least 90% of them erected before the adoption of modern building codes in the 1970s. Most won’t flat-out collapse in a city-centered earthquake the size of 1989’s Loma Prieta, but there will be damage beyond repair from the quake and ensuing fire to about a quarter of the
Size does matter for construction folks who, by nature, like telling tall tales about how their project is the world’s tallest, longest or deepest. But the wildest reason ever given for a project malfunctioning has to be that offered for the shower of sparks and released cloud of super-cold helium when the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was switched on last year in Switzerland: Some physicists believed a theoretical subatomic-particle called the Higgs boson (also known as the God particle), which scientists hope to create with the collider, would be so catastrophic to nature that its effects would ripple back in
The money now is flowing from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act for a variety of construction projects, ranging from simple paving jobs to sophisticated energy-efficiency revamps of federal buildings. But something is missing—public support. The economic-stimulus funding bill that Congress passed in February allocated $787 billion for the overall economic mission, but only about $130 billion for construction. Tenn-TomWaterway Yet the most visible aspects of the stimulus are the construction projects, and the ones under way do little to lift people’s spirits, give them hope about the future or cause them to open their wallets and start spending again.
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