Thanks to problems with elevator-cable girth, weight and sway, supertall-building specialists often get hung up on the ropes when designing towers taller than 500 or 600 meters.
If not for a family trip to his parents’ native Greece in 1997, when he was a civil engineering student in Germany, concrete mix master Andreas Tselebidis would have missed his life’s calling.
In 2010, when Ronald W. Wackrow was about four months shy of completing the rescue of the troubled 6.5-million-sq-ft Cosmopolitan in Las Vegas, his boss, Related Cos. Chairman Stephen M. Ross, suggested his next assignment: Relocate to the East Coast to steer design and construction of the developer’s 17.5- million-sq-ft Hudson Yards—a 26-acre mini-city primarily sited over the Long Island Railroad yard on the far West Side of Midtown Manhattan.
Various “thought leaders” in the industry have been trying—some would say hitting their heads against the wall—for at least the 37 years that I have been covering buildings (and likely before that), to use technology to streamline, automate and quicken building design and construction.
While the U.S. Green Building Council is busy making a business case for a greener globe, other environmentalists are busy making greener buildings, communities and cities.
Having recently reached a height of 113 meters, the contender for the title of the world’s tallest building is slowly growing up in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
The first ropeless, tall-building elevator—a compact, lightweight system that mimics a subway line on end—is set to enter the testing and certification stage in early 2017.
