REX How many structural engineers does it take to shape a building? Ordinarily, none. That’s the architect’s job. But the $490-million Museum Plaza, smack on an Ohio River flood plain between a levee wall and an elevated highway in Louisville, Ky., is no ordinary job. The site is terrible. The packed, multifaceted program is intertwined. And the project is the most ambitious and audacious to date for its up-and-coming design architect—the one-year-old REX. The architecture for the 1.6-million-sq-ft Museum Plaza is a “complex synergy between the constraints of economics, structure and layout,” says 37-year-old Joshua Prince-Ramus, who with his 36-year-old partner,
Jason Schmidt Prince-Ramus (front, right) at REX’s helm, with his partner Ella (front, left). After six years running OMA New York, architect Joshua Prince-Ramus felt it was time to cut the umbilical cord with his largely absentee partner-mentor, Rem Koolhaas. OMA NY, formed in 2000, was owned by Koolhaas and Prince-Ramus. “Our office became an aberration within OMA,” says Prince-Ramus, who cut his teeth on OMA’s unorthodox Seattle Central Library. “There were six partners in the [Rotterdam-based Office of Metropol-itan Architecture] and me in New York,” he says. Prince-Ramus maintains that Koolhaas’s reputation was keeping OMA NY from getting work.
OSHA Early on July 6, 2005, a union operating engineer went to work at a Jacksonville Beach, Fla., condominium project, not far from the ocean’s edge. He set up a Manitowoc 222 crawler crane with a 105-ft-long main boom and 140 ft of luffing jib and prepared for the day’s first lift. Another operator, who had been on the crane the day before but was laid up that morning with an injury sustained at home, had left a penny wedged in the limit-bypass switch for maximum boom lift. The new operator didn’t touch it. The replacement operator began to simultaneously
Tudor Van Hampton/ENR Old friction rigs are still in demand. The safety and skill required to operate crawler cranes has evolved from coordinating clutch levers and brake pedals to managing computer buttons and joysticks. While the physical wear and tear is getting easier, the mental load can be demanding. Operating old, friction-style cranes by “feel,” though not condoned by manufacturers, is still common in the field due to the cranes’ overengineered structures. “This machine has the life beat out of it, and it still acts new,” says Joe Ahern, who muscles a 35-year-old Manitowoc 4000W for Roselle, Ill.-based Case Foundation
Hong Kong, already home to a necklace of long-span suspension and cable-stayed bridges, is adding another to its collection. The 1.6-kilometer-long, cable-stayed Stonecutters Bridge will have a 1,018-m-long main span, slated to be the world’s second longest, to be supported from unique composite steel-and-concrete towers reaching 295 m tall. That span is scheduled to be erected next year but the project has featured controversy since its design competition, and unexpected underground conditions have followed. Hear what Arup's Bob Lind has to say in the video box below. The $343-million dual three-lane crossing over Hong Kong’s Rambler Channel is part of
Photo: Tudor Van Hampton 'Roach coach' cuisine aside, construction jobs can be stuffed with nourishment for the soul. From a 23-year-old to a septuagenarian, from the depths of a tunnel to the roof of a ballpark, from Chicago to London—the lives and times of construction professionals are rich with extremes: A teacher. A crane operator. A development manager for a 92-story highrise. A drilling superintendent. An overseer of the London Underground's reconstruction. A plumbing contractor. A structural engineer pushing steel quality. An architect. Builders of a ballpark, a casino, a biotechnology campus and a transmission line. A transportation planner in
Charlene Prost/ENR Daniel Hunyar was on the highway in his black pickup truck just after 6 a.m. He was hoping to make his 45-minute commute in time to grab coffee and maybe a bagel or doughnut before meetings with subcontractors and superintendents on a $265-million hotel, conference center and garage addition at an Ameristar casino on the bank of the Missouri River in St. Charles, Mo., just north of St. Louis. The 57-year-old Walton Construction Co. LLC vice president and project executive, with 35 years of construction experience, was expecting to plan and coordinate the upcoming work week. But when
Debra K. Rubin/ENR Hofmanns office is a cramped crane cab with a view of lower Manhattan skyline. Pia Hofmann is unhappy this Monday morning that demolition of Ground Zero’s Deutsche Bank building, the last major remnant of the Sept. 11, 2001, attack didn’t progress fast enough the week before to “jump down” her 320-ft-tall tower crane by 70 ft. “Your depth perception is difficult when you’re this high up,” says the union operating engineer, who has run the Australian-made luffing jib crane since March 15 at the damaged structure, helping to painstakingly dismantle it floor by floor. Working in Manhattan’s
Andrew G. Wright/ENR Like many other boys growing up in the Bronx, Joe Byrne dreamed of someday earning his paycheck by performing in a starring role at Yankee Stadium. Today, Byrne is the toast of his Throgs Neck neighborhood for making his dream a reality. He works as a project executive for Turner Construction Co., the lead contractor for the Yankees’ new ballpark, under construction across from the existing stadium in the South Bronx. During the past decade, Byrne worked on two of Manhattan’s signature proj-ects: Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s Bear Stearns headquarters and Foster + Partners’ Hearst Tower. But
Photo: Tudor Van Hampton Ironworkers install shackles on a shaft casing, with Jones (center) supervising. Rob Jones is a former Marine, so slogging through swampy soil and confined spaces comes naturally. He's a big fish in a small pond, digging deep foundations on Chicago's tightest jobsites. But this drilling superintendent's pond is about to get much bigger. Last month, he was in charge of an overcrowded jobsite in downtown Chicago at Aqua, a $475-million, 81-story mixed-use tower designed by local architect Jeanne Gang, and part of a $4-billion development called Lakeshore East. This month, he will start building the massive
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