+ Image Click Image to Enlarge + Image Click Image to Enlarge Related Links: Architecture 2030 NCARB AIA Contract Documents McGraw Hill Construction Market Research Architecture 2030—a group bent on catalyzing the buildings sector to phase out carbon emissions related to the built environment—is picking up steam. Last month, the group issued its "challenge" to building product manufacturers to produce environmentally benign building products by 2030.In 2006, Architecture 2030 unveiled a strategy to dramatically reduce global energy consumption and greenhouse-gas emissions through "low carbon" design. More recently, it released a road map to "zero emissions" for buildings—new construction and existing
Courtesy of BIG Museum's double-spiral form lets in daylight. The clock started ticking for Bjarke Ingels Group when Swiss watchmaker, Audemars Piguet, selected the design firm, called BIG, for a 2,400-sq-m watchmaking museum, called Maison des Fondateurs, in the Vallee de Joux.The intertwined, double-spiral-shaped pavilion, also an expansion of the Audemars Piguet facility, will contain a succession of galleries and three workshops.The roof and celing of the low-lying pavilion are cut from a single sheet of metal, clad in brass, that is continuous in plan but undulates in section to create a series of openings that allow in daylight and
Courtesy of Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture If all goes as planned, the Kingdom Tower, which will be the future world's tallest building, will contain the world's most lightweight elevator system. Related Links: KONE's High-Rise Elevator System Called Breakthrough Technology Designers Apply Lessons from World's Tallest Tower to Improve Future 'Megatallest' KONE Corp. has won the contract for the vertical transportation in Kingdom Tower, a multi-use building that is planned for a record height of 1 kilometer. For the tower, under way near Jeddah, KONE plans to install its lightweight hoisting system, called UltraRope, which it introduced last year.If
Images Courtesy of HUD Rebuild by Design The Manhattan plan (above) is for a defense that would double as a linear park. The Meadowlands scheme would protect several towns. If all goes well, the biggest winners in a competition to spark ideas for protecting coastal areas in the wake of 2012's Superstorm Sandy may be the cities of the world. The most ambitious of the six winning schemes of the U.S. Dept. of Housing and Urban Development's "Rebuild by Design" competition calls for landscaped storm-surge protection that doubles as parkland along Manhattan's edge in New York City. The scheme's designer
Image Courtesy Core studio | Thornton Tomasetti Output from a hackathon where four people designed different parts of a building. Related Links: Mobile 3D-Model Viewer, Mark-Up Software Now Available Makerbot's New 3D Digitizer Turns Physical Objects Digital A collaboration tool that allows multiple authors of a Grasshopper 3D design model to stream geometry to the web in real time is available at no cost by downloading a plug-in. The tool, called Platypus, works like a chat room for parametric geometry and allows on-the-fly 3D model mashups in a browser.Since Platypus's late-April release, there have been hundreds of downloads from www.3dplatyp.us,
Renderings Courtesy of 360 Architecture The oculus design by 360 Architecture, with engineer Buro Happold, for the convertible roof of a $1.2-billion multipurpose stadium in Atlanta represents a radical departure from kinetic roofs of other sports facilities.The stadium design also calls for a novel 58-ft-tall "halo" scoreboard hung from the rim of the opening. Construction of the 1.8-million-sq-ft facility for football's Atlanta Falcons began last month, by the Holder Hunt Russell Moody Joint Venture. After the 71,000-seat stadium opens in 2017, the nearby Georgia Dome will be razed.
Related Links: International Living Future Institute WELL Building Standard Buoyed by the progress of its performance-based Living Building Challenge green-building certification program, the International Living Future Institute is casting a net beyond the LBC. ILFI, through the umbrella Living Future Challenge announced recently, says it is developing even more ways to rethink "the way humanity designs its systems, products, buildings and communities.""It's the Living Future Institute, not the Living Building Institute, because it's not just about buildings," said Jason McLennan, ILFI's CEO. "The Living Future Challenge is a framework for remaking everything."Toward that goal, ILFI introduced the third version of
Related Links: In Memoriam: Abe Gutman, Structural EngineerA Tribute by ENR Buildings Editor Nadine Post Abraham “Abe” Gutman, 73, an internationally recognized structural engineer and concrete foundations expert whose projects included New York City’s 6-million-sq-ft GutmanWorld Financial Center and foundations for the 3.3-million-sq-ft Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur, and who also was senior vice president and a 45-year veteran of design firm Thornton-Tomasetti, died suddenly on April 9 of an undisclosed cause.Gutman was one of the firm’s first principals and was named a fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers.He was actively involved in structural integrity inspections and
Photo Courtesy of Sellar The busy site, crossed by a bus station and adjacent to a rail station, limited foundation locations. Photo Courtesy of Sellar Floor-to-ceiling windows offer views of the neighboring Shard, which was designed and built by the same firms. Related Links: 2014 Global Best Projects Winners The Place The firms that designed and built The Place were no strangers to each other. They had cut their teeth on the 17-story office building's 306-meter-tall neighbor, The Shard, which was named the Best Large Project of ENR's 2013 Global Best Projects contest (ENR 6/3/13 p. 51).The building-team familiarity bred
The $351-million Canadian Museum for Human Rights, with nearly indescribable shapes nicknamed Mountain (main building), Cloud (entrance facade glazing), Tower of Hope (spire) and Roots (splayed legs), had all the usual challenges of asymmetrical and nonrepetitive architecture.
