POWER PLAY The building can be an energy source instead of a liability. (Rendering courtesy of Kiss + Cathcart Architects) Product developers, building owners and designers are taking a new look at high-performance glass facades as key in creating buildings with improved access to daylight, better indoor air quality and improved energy efficiency. But a facade that helps improve a building's interior environment and limits its loss of energy is not enough, say some sources. A building's skin should be a power generator rather than an energy liability. "Although glass curtain walls are becoming more and more thermally efficient," says
FUTURE Projects such as Denver's T-Rex await new funds. (Photo by Gregg Gargan/T-REX) The past four years have been golden for transportation engineers and contractors, thanks to the 1998 Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century, the largest public works funding measure in U.S. history. When it expires on Sept. 30, TEA-21 will have poured out more than $220 billion for highway and mass transit projects around the country, a 40% hike over the six-year program that preceded it. As Congress now gets set to start drafting a TEA-21 successor, industry executives and state officials are pushing for an encore.
BIG GRID Exterior walls of Simmons dorm, which support the building and the architecture, were tricky to assemble. (Photo courtesy of MIT/Andy Ryan) Loners no longer wanted. Nerds take notice. Bookworms be on alert. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is on a $1-billion building campaign to soften its edges--from streetscape to study cove. And it's doing so by building audacious architecture that stands out, fits in and nurtures community, socialization and even amusement. The goal is to show that good living is good for learning. Standards of flexibility, compatibility, economy and accessibility are still in force, but MIT's design principles
OLD AND NEW Aging housing is torn down as units rise at San Diego naval base. (Photo by Lenska Aerial Images for Clark Realty) By the mid-1990s, the condition of family housing at one U.S. military base had become such an embarrassment that a base engineer suggested that he was the biggest slumlord in his city. Aging and often poorly maintained housing stock was rampant at the nation's bases and installations and was becoming a major recruiting disincentive. (Photo by Charlotte Kraenzle/Clark Realty) Lacking resources and management skills to quickly renovate or replace 300,000 units of family base housing, the
FACADE FEAR Convention center's varied skin so unnerved bidders that it was built on the basis of time and materials. (Photos courtesy of Clark Construction) The $833.9-million Washington Convention Center nearing completion in the nation's capital could contain two Washington Monuments laid end to end. It could also hold six football fields or four Boeing 747 jetliners. The more than 2.3-million-sq-ft building, one of the 10 largest in the U.S., has 16 acres of roof. It contains more than 40,000 tons of steel in 250 trusses and columns. It has roughly 600,000 sq ft of facade, more than 8 acres
Copper, gold, bronze, orange, white, silver, violet, green, blue and aqua. The 184,000-sq-ft curtain wall of the $300-million Westin New York at Times Square has 10 base colors, 8,000 panes of glass and so little repetition in shape, size, color, thickness and panel details that the units were bar-coded at the fabricator to keep track of inventory. JAZZY GEOMETRICS Hotel has 10 colors in towerwalls.(Photo by Norman McGrath, Courtesy Tishman Realty & Construction CO. INC) "The complexity [was] getting the right color in the right panel in the right location," says Joseph L. Ross, executive vice president of Tishman Construction
PHOTOGRAPHER: Mike O’Dwyer SUBMITTER: Lisa Page, Bovis Lend Lease, London A worker smooths a pile cap at London’s Pater Noster Square, part of the foundation of new buildings being constructed near St. Paul’s Cathedral. The buildings are part of the overall reconstruction of the square, damaged in World War II. Click on photo for larger image. The construction industry in 2002 entered what some have called an "Age of Anxiety" as key markets around the world began to slump significantly, terrorism became a household word in places totally unaccustomed to it and saber rattling by some of the biggest and
(Illustration by Guy Lawrence for ENR) Deflation of key materials prices has set the tone for ENR's cost indexes in recent years. In 2002, the materials component of ENR's indexes declined 3.2%. This follows annual declines of 3.3 and 3.0% during the previous two years. Economists are calling for construction markets to soften in 2003 and ENR believes that will translate into a fourth annual decline for the index's materials component. However, multiyear collective bargaining agreements set at the peak of the recent expansion will continue to push wages up and they will carry ENR's cost indexes with them. By
For several years, design professionals sat in the catbird seat, able to parlay personnel shortages in a boom market into significant pay and benefit packages. Design firms lamented dealing with the "domino effect," where they would lose a top person to another firm and then be forced to steal a top performer from a third firm, and so on. How times have changed. Most classes of managers have seen a flattening out of their salaries and compensation as many markets have fallen off and demand for new personnel has dwindled. One of the most dramatic pieces of evidence that there
(Photo courtesy of British Gypsum) Europe's dominant gypsum wallboard makers are preparing to fight some of the most severe penalties ever imposed by the European Commission for allegedly operating a cartel. After a four-year probe, EC handed out fines totalling $480 million to four companies, claiming they rigged the market covering 80% of European Union buyers between 1992 and 1998. Paris-based Société Lafarge S.A. was fined $250 million; BPB plc, Slough, England, $140 million; Germany's Gebrüder Knauf Westdeutsche Gipswerke K.G., Inhofen, $85 million; and Gyproc Benelux SA/NV, Wijnegen, Belgium, $4 million. The cartel allegedly began in 1992 when BPB, Knauf
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