Related Links: San Francisco Skyscraper Lifts Stature of Seismic Design Performance Design Floodgates Open on the West Coast Strong Motion Center Scientists say there is a 63% probability of a damaging earthquake in the Bay Area in the next 30 years. Officials in quake-prone California recently took a step toward making the best of the Big One, when it does hit, by installing the densest array of accelerometers in any U.S. skyscraper to date. The 72 sensors, activated recently in the tallest tower in the U.S. built using performance-based seismic design, are expected to yield valuable data about the behavior
Related Links: BIM Standard May Boost Sharing C3 Systems: Beyond BIM Experts say version two of the nation's first consensus standard for the setup and exchange of building information models advances the use of BIM by providing a road map and common language for model building."This is truly a big change," says Deke Smith, executive director of the buildingSMART alliance of the National Institute of Building Sciences and the standard's developer. But he also says there is much work to do and obstacles to overcome on the way to a more mature standard. "We have only scratched the surface on
Experts say version two of the nation’s first consensus standard for the setup and exchange of building information models advances the use of BIM by providing a road map and common language for model building.
Every couple of months, when non-Iraqi representatives of the design team, mostly from the U.S., visit the site of the $100-million Al-Menaa Sports Complex in a suburb of Basra, they move in and out of the war-torn nation with as much secrecy as possible. All travel plans and meeting locations are kept confidential. They alert only one construction executive to the trip. While there, they have armed guards escorting them at all times. Instead of a construction fence, a precast-concrete security wall surrounds the site."We even have to be careful about how we send e-mails about travel to the site,"
Related Links: GSA Federal Center South Green Design-Build Model Crafted for Buildings To Achieve Net-Zero Energy Use In an unprecedented departure from the norm, the performance-based design-build team for a fast-tracked office building nearing completion in Seattle is at risk for 0.5% of its original $66-million contract award. The team will not receive the $330,000 held back by the owner unless the three-story building meets energy-use targets promised by the team long before a shovel hit the ground.The fee holdback, combined with a 12-month, post-occupancy measurement and verification period to fine-tune building operations, is the brainchild of the U.S. General
Stanford Krawinkler Related Links: Helmut Krawinkler "lived and breathed" structural and earthquake engineering through teaching, research, analytic modeling, design and contributions to practice, says Gregory G. Deierlein, the John A. Blume professor of engineering at Stanford University, Palo Alto, Calif.Krawinkler, an Austrian native who joined the Stanford faculty in 1973, died suddenly on April 16 in Los Altos, Calif., during treatment for a brain tumor. He was 72. Krawinkler—who held the Blume post until 2007, when he became professor emeritus—developed methodologies that changed how engineers evaluate seismic safety and damage potential. His work in the 1990s laid the foundation for the
Related Links: NRELs Research Support Facility: An Energy Performance Update For its first year of full occupancy, the nation's biggest energy miser—the nearly two-year-old 220,000-sq-ft Research Support Facility of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory—met its modeled annual energy-use targets, reports the Golden, Colo.-based NREL.But a market-rate, low-energy-use office building doesn't happen by accident. "It's not going to work unless the owner takes responsibility both in planning and operating the building," says Jeffrey M. Baker, director of NREL operations for the U.S. Dept. of Energy's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy.For the 12 months beginning in February 2011, the building's
Rendering courtesy of Ena Cheung/Thornton Tomasetti Investigators are using forensic information modeling to study structural failures, such as the 2007 highway bridge collapse in Minneapolis. Red color indicates steel corrosion. Structural engineers are harnessing technology's power to learn from failures and ultimately improve the built environment. New interactive digital databases—similar to YouTube, SharePoint and Wikipedia—offer the potential to improve codes and practice, agree engineers. With global engineering research, knowledge and failure data at their fingertips, designers are able to connect the dots as never before."We are on the brink of [an information] revolution," said engineer Santiago Pujol at the 2012
Surprisingly positive results from the first of four large-scale tests of reinforced-concrete link beams with embedded structural steel sections have further opened the door to more-constructible concrete towers in highly seismic zones. Link beams over openings in concrete shear-wall cores have long been the bane of builders because of intense reinforcing-steel congestion, which slows construction.During the first-ever large-scale test, the beam performed much better than anticipated. Given the importance of link beams in core-wall buildings, understanding performance at a meaningful scale is of "critical importance," says Ron Klemencic, president of structural engineer Magnusson Klemencic Associates (MKA), Seattle.MKA is one of
