Image courtesy of Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture Kingdom Tower, under design by Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture, with structural engineer Thornton Tomasetti, would enclose 530,000 sq m. The skyscraper is expected to cost $1.2 billion. If a Middle East prince has his way, Saudi Arabia will someday be home to the world's tallest building. Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz recently unveiled a scheme for a 5.3-sq-kilometer city north of Jeddah that would include a mixed-use supertower designed to reach more 1 km above the desert floor.Kingdom Tower, under design by Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture, with
After years of chugging along, the development of the nation's first consensus-based standard for the use of building information modeling is finally picking up steam. The buildingSMART alliance, which is releasing the National BIM Standard-United States, or NBIMS-US, says a version of the standard will be out by year's end. Beginning on Aug. 3, the 30-day public-comment period will broach the 45 topics that form the core of the standard.“We're out of the back room,” says Deke Smith, executive director of the alliance, which is a council of the National Institute of Building Sciences, Washington, D.C.Smith and his colleagues have
Hooray, Arrays! Image Courtesy of NREL The National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado. Thanks to its arrays of photovoltaic cells with a total production capacity of 973 kW, the nation's largest net-zero energy-use building produced as much energy as it used on June 22. National Renewable Energy Laboratory researchers in the Dept. of Energy's 220,000-sq-ft Research Support Facility expect the Golden, Colo., building to achieve NZEU for the month of July, assuming the sun continues to shine. DOE's Jeffrey M. Baker, the facility's visionary and ENR's 2011 Award of Excellence winner, reports the year-old building is performing as designed (ENR
Architects and structural-steel, concrete and masonry interests fighting the “wood first” movement are breathing a collective sigh of relief since Oregon legislators adjourned for the year on June 30 without enacting legislation that would give wood a leg up over other framing materials for use in public buildings. Photo by Patrick Cotter Architects The Remy, a six-story, wood-framed apartment building in Vancouver, B.C., where the wood-first movement was born. It was partly complete when a May 3 fire destroyed it. Photo by Nick Procaylo / The Vancouver Sun An opponent of Canada's 'wood first' movement cited the Remy, a six-story
Builders of a 201,000-sq-ft art museum set in a blasted-out ravine in northwest Arkansas knew they would be digging themselves into a hole when they signed on to construct the pet project of Alice Walton, heiress to the Walmart discount chain-store fortune. They were prepared for headaches associated with the job's remote location in Walton's 120-acre forest. They had braced themselves for building structures, dams and ponds in a flood-prone streambed. And they were prepared for architect Moshe Safdie's curved forms and cable-supported roofs. “We were quite intrigued by the cable structures across the creek—which to our knowledge had never
Georgia Institute of Technology professor Charles M. Eastman, long considered a research guru for computer-based building design and construction, displays parental pride in his latest brainchild: Georgia Tech’s Digital Building Laboratory. Unlike Eastman’s past efforts, starting some 40 years ago, the fledgling DBL, created in 2009 to help improve building design and construction through the aid of digital tools, is a collaboration among academics and players in the buildings-sector food chain. “This is industry and academia together,” says Eastman, DBL’s director and a professor of both architecture and computing at Georgia Tech, Atlanta. “To me, it is so obvious that
Georgia Institute of Technology professor Charles M. Eastman, long considered a research guru for computer-based building design and construction, displays parental pride in his latest brainchild: Georgia Tech's Digital Building Laboratory. Unlike Eastman's past efforts, starting some 40 years ago, the fledgling DBL, created in 2009 to help improve building design and construction through the aid of digital tools, is a collaboration among academics and players in the buildings-sector food chain. “This is industry and academia together,” says Eastman, DBL's director and a professor of both architecture and computing at Georgia Tech, Atlanta. “To me, it is so obvious that
A lawsuit over construction of a life-sciences building at a major university stands as the first known claim related to the use of building information modeling by an architect.
Guidelines for the performance-based design of structures to resist disproportionate collapse are under development by the American Society of Civil Engineers' Structural Engineering Institute. SEI expects to release a draft next year and publish the guidelines in 2013. “We are providing guidelines for those who wish to use them. We are not mandating use,” says Robert Smilowitz, chairman of the SEI's disproportionate collapse standards and guidance committee and a principal at structural engineer Weidlinger Associates Inc., New York City. “Our immediate objective is to provide a solid technical basis for designing structures that are more resistant to disproportionate collapse. It
It is lucky for Aqua Tower architect Jeanne Gang that developer James R. Loewenberg thinks the Oscar Niemeyer architecture of Brasilia, the half-century-old capital city of Brazil, is monotonous and static. If not, he might never have hired Gang for one of the four residential towers of the 28-acre Lakeshore East multi-use development in Chicago. And if that hadn’t happened, there would be no Aqua Tower. Related Links: On Her Precipice “Brasilia is the most boring place because all the buildings were done by the same person,” says Loewenberg, the co-CEO of Magellan Development Group and president of Loewenberg Architects,
