Inazawa City, Japan, is the home of Mitsubishi Electric’s elevator division, and accordingly, the city skyline includes six small peaks—all towers that the company uses to test its product. Earlier this year, Mitsubishi inaugurated its seventh elevator testing tower, a 568-foot-tall structure that’s also the tallest building of its kind in the world. Photo courtesy Mitsubishi Electric Corporation Mitsubishi will use its 568-foot-tall tower to help develop higher-speed and higher-capacity elevators. According to Mitsubishi, the new precast-concrete-clad tower, called Solaé, is a direct response to a high-rise building boom. With record-breaking skyscrapers under construction in emerging markets like Dubai and
The U.S. Army, in conjunction with private industry, is involved in a multiyear research project that could yield stronger, lighter, and longer-span structures, for both civil and military applications. The research is examining the benefits of adding vanadium to steel. Photos courtesy Simpson Gumpertz & Heger Engineers subjected vanadium-based steel angles (top) and fully assembled trusses (above) to various loads to analyze the components' behavior. Vanadium is an element distributed widely through a variety of minerals. But in the U.S., it is primarily recovered from by-products of chemical and petroleum processing. The addition of a small amount to steel, from
The Fourth Factor: A Historical Perspective on Architecture and Medicine, by John Michael Currie. Washington, D.C.: The American Institute of Architects, 2007, 191 pages, $39.99. The title of this book refers to the words of Hippocrates of Kos, widely regarded as the father of Western medicine. He held that there were “three factors” important to the success of medical care: the disease, the patient, and the physician. But here, author John Michael Currie, AIA, expands this list to acknowledge the role of the built environment in the healing process. Illustrated with historical images that Currie has been collecting for almost
Now that the New Museum on Manhattan’s Lower East Side is complete, and its structure enclosed, there is little evidence of the system that supports the seven-story building that seems to be made up of nothing heavier than precariously stacked cardboard boxes.
The California Building Standards Commission (CBSC) moved in December 2007 to allow the reclassification of potentially hundreds of seismically questionable hospitals in the state to avoid possible closure due to code noncompliance. The decision will likely ripple through the large market for health-care design and construction that developed following Southern California’s Northridge earthquake in 1994, which left many hospitals still standing, but structurally unsound. “This is giving hospitals more time to do what’s right,” says Chris Poland, a structural engineer and the president and C.E.O. of San Francisco–based Degenkolb Engineers. After the 1994 earthquake, Poland served on an advisory board
Crimped and folded like the tectonic plates of the nearby Papago and Camelback Mountains, the roof that tops the Tempe Center for the Arts provides the facility with its signature element. Made of concrete over metal deck and supported by exposed tubular trusses, the iconic roof shelters the collection of programmatic elements that compose the $67.6 million center, including a 600-seat proscenium theater, a 200-seat studio theater, and a 3,500-square-foot gallery.
Structural base isolation—effectively “floating” a building on rubber pads to safely ride out an earthquake—is nothing new in California. But the isolators installed for the structural and architectural renovation of Pasadena’s 1927 City Hall, designed by Bakewell and Brown, represent an innovative approach for addressing historic structures.
After languishing for years outside the mainstream, "switchable glazing" is poised to become a viable alternative and could soon have a significant impact on facade design.
After languishing for years outside the mainstream, "switchable glazing" is poised to become a viable alternative and could soon have a significant impact on facade design.
After languishing for years outside the mainstream, "switchable glazing" is poised to become a viable alternative and could soon have a significant impact on facade design. Two other types of switchable glazing are called liquid crystal device windows and suspended particle device windows (SPD). Liquid crystal technology has been used for some time in wristwatches and is gaining popularity as privacy glazing. A thin layer of liquid crystals is sandwiched between two transparent electrical conductors on thin plastic films, and the entire device is laminated between two layers of glass. When power is off, the liquid crystals are in a
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