Photo Courtesy of SHP Leading Design New international sustainable schools initiative involves 30 nations. Related Links: Global Coalition for Green Schools U.S. Green Building Council World Green Building Council Underwriter Laboratories With the recent launch of the Global Coalition for Green Schools, the U.S. Green Building Council and the World Green Building Council are putting a stronger-than-ever emphasis on supporting the design, construction and operation of sustainable schools. The coalition will work to reshape schools and "fundamentally change" the way students learn about the world around them, says the USGBC."This is not just about energy efficiency" but about the whole
Related Links: High-Rise Modular Construction Forces Major Adjustments Fancy Footwork To Steady the Course of Brooklyn's Controversial Atlantic Yards Sports Village Forest City Ratner Skanska USA Building Bruce C. Ratner is renowned for taking the path of most resistance. Over 28 years of development gambits in the New York City area, the reluctant real estate mogul has created 16.7 million sq ft in 42 buildings by chasing deals with physical, financial and political potholes.For the 68-year-old Ratner—cut from a different cloth than most developers—complexity has become the mother of many inventions. The latest gamble of the founder of Forest City
Photo by Nelson Barkerman Multi-trade teams work together in the assembly plant for a 32-story modular tower. Related Links: Developer Bruce C. Ratner Digs Into Difficult Deals to Alter the Urban Lanscape Forest City Ratner Skanska USA Building Modular Construction in Multi-trade Environment Set to Grow, Says FMI Study Things are beginning to stack up nicely at the 100,000-sq-ft assembly plant for the latest far-out adventure of developer Forest City Ratner Cos.—modular high-rise residential construction. On Nov. 1, the first 27 of 930 modules moved off the line for FCRC's 32-story B2 Bklyn tower at the nearby Atlantic Yards development.Last
Related Links: Tensioning Eases Stress on a 13-Story Sustainability Showcase TMG Partners Tipping Mar Plant Construction Co. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill Earthquake Protection Systems In a back-to-the-future scenario, the structural engineer for the seismic retrofit of a 1962 steel moment-resisting frame in earthquake-prone San Francisco fashioned the office building's high-tech lateral system after an ancient Japanese pagoda. The building's 14-story pivoting spine—equivalent to a pagoda's wooden "shinbashira"—turned into a $4-million-plus silver lining to a recession-related hiatus for the $110-million gut renovation and expansion of 680 Folsom Street.Instead of a tree trunk pivoting in a well in the ground, the ultra-modern
Rendering Courtesy of SOM Plan for brownfield site along Lake Michigan calls for 700 buildings. Related Links: Chicago Lakeside Development Argonne National Laboratory Skidmore, Owings & Merrill Computer scientists are teaming up with planners, developers and big data tools to inform decisions about megadevelopments. The goal of one fledgling effort is to develop a prototype computational framework that would be instrumental in planning the infrastructure for the future 600-acre Chicago Lakeside Development, a minicity sited on a former U.S. Steel complex on Lake Michigan, 10 miles south of downtown."Planners don't want to rely on intuition or hope. They want to
Related Links: FLEXLAB, for Plug 'n Play Green-Building Studies, Has Worlds First Revolving Test Bed Putting a Square Peg in a Round Hole to Construction the World's First Rotating Test Laboratory Researchers in Norway, Singapore are Cloning FLEXLAB FLEXLAB Stantec Stantec Architecture was stumped, having gone down several dead ends trying to design a system to manage the 48 ft of flexible conduit in the crawl space under FLEXLAB's rotational green-systems test building in Berkeley, Calif. The team worried about the conduit slack, which allows the turntable to rotate without ripping out the electrical service, snaking around on the concrete
Related Links: 11th-Hour Solution Solves Cable-Protection Headache at FLEXLAB's Rotating Test-Bed Building Researchers in Norway, Singapore Are Cloning FLEXLAB Putting a Square Peg in a Round Hole to Construct the World's First Rotating Test Laboratory FLEXLAB Singapore's Centre for Sustainable Buildings and Construction On Sept. 12, crews successfully rotated a 64-ft-dia turntable, complete with its unique cable management system, for the world's first revolving rent-a-lab for full-scale green-building-systems performance tests. The 40%-completed lazy-Susan building, which tracks the sun from the southeast to northeast by rotating 270˚, is the trickiest part of FLEXLAB, a $15.7-million research complex at the Lawrence Berkeley
Related Links: FLEXLAB, for Plug 'n Play Green-Building Studies, Has Worlds First Revolving Test Bed FLEXLAB PROSPECT Silicon Valley Cindy Regnier, manager of the world's first research laboratory for full-scale performance mock-ups of integrated green-building systems, is canvassing the world to find partners and research sponsors for the facility, called FLEXLAB. Regnier is bent on doing her part to create a new paradigm for energy conservation in buildings. And she is using the lab as a springboard.She seems to be succeeding. The $15.7-million FLEXLAB, which stands for "Facility for Low-Energy Experiments in Buildings," is still under construction on the campus
Photo by Doug Lockhart, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory The walls of the rotating test building have no braces thanks to an inverted moment frame. Courtesy of John Wolfe, Tipping Mar The orthogonal girder system, rare for a turntable, will collect earthquake forces from the building columns and transfer them to the central pivot foundation. Related Links: FLEXLAB, for Plug 'n Play Green-Building Studies, Has World's First Revolving Test Bed 11th-Hour Solution Solves Cable-Protection Headache at FLEXLAB's Rotating Test-Bed Building Researchers in Norway, Singapore Are Cloning FLEXLAB Constructing a single-story laboratory disguised as a 1,610-sq-ft office building—with interchangeable parts and systems
Courtesy of Snohetta for the Golden State Warriors Snohetta remains the lead design firm for the San Francisco arena-on-a-pier but Manica Architecture has been added to the team. San Francisco’s Golden State Warriors basketball team is in the final stages of selecting an architect of record for its planned arena-on-a-pier. The team recently brought in Manica Architecture, Kansas City, Mo., to work on the "bones" of the arena and related buildings, says P.J. Johnston, a team spokesman.Architect AECOM completed its first phase of design work in the spring and is still on the project but only as a strategic advisor
