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Upon receiving approval, construction of MVRDV's The Couch is set to begin this month. The Couch is a club house that the Dutch firm designed together with co-architect Studio Bouwkunde for IJburg, a growing tennis club established in 2010 on an artificial island in Amsterdam. — bustler.net
Images courtesy of MVRDV. View full entry
After winning first prize in a 2009 international competition, Henning Larsen Architects' Kolding Campus building for the University of Southern Denmark is full of sustainable features. One in particular is the recent construction of its facade, which is built with a solar shading system that maintains climate control throughout the day — and plus, the triangular shape of the solar shutters add a nifty-looking pattern for the structure. — bustler.net
[Genie is] a platform with online-based planning applications to help architects and engineers in the design process, especially for skyscrapers and large buildings. The platform includes planning tools of expert architects and engineers and advance analytics and simulation tools. Genie standardizes and automates the design and construction processes with unlimited design options, enabling an architect to preserve the building's uniqueness in the urban environment. — Globes
The much anticipated—and wildly criticized—San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge finally opened to the public earlier this week (previously on Archinect). See 42,000 hours of bridge construction compressed to a compact 4-minute time-lapse video below. View full entry
China is home to 60 of the world’s 100 tallest buildings now under construction. But the skyward aspirations of Changsha, the capital of Hunan province, have inspired incredulity tinged with hostility. [...] the project’s scale and speed have set off a burst of national introspection in recent days about whether Chinese municipal leaders and developers have gone too far in their increasingly manic reach for the skies. — nytimes.com
Previously: Sky City, world's tallest building, stops construction due to lack of government approval View full entry
MIT researchers have developed a lightweight structure whose tiny blocks can be snapped together much like the bricks of a child’s construction toy. The new material, the researchers say, could revolutionize the assembly of airplanes, spacecraft, and even larger structures, such as dikes and levees. — MIT News Office
Finding 3D printed materials unsuitable for structural applications, this group of researchers has been investigating new ways of building "big things out of small pieces". The configurations proposed are claimed to be much less susceptible to sudden failure, providing redundancy and predictable... View full entry
Yin Zhi, head of Beijing Tsinghua Urban Design Institute, said, "The technique that Broad Group uses has no precedent in the world, and the cost they promised is very low. So they either have some record breaking techniques or it’s a lie. They are gambling. If they win, they will change the history of world architecture, but that's one chance in a million." — news.xinhuanet.com
In China’s Hunan province, ground was broken for the next "world's tallest skyscraper". It was a brave ambition. The developer Broad Group planned to build an 838 meter tower with 202 stories, in just 10 months. The tower would surpass the current tallest skyscraper, Dubai’s Burj... View full entry
Stud Find is an iPhone application that uses the device's built-in magnetometer to find metal studs, screws, nails and anything metallic in a wall.
The iPhone's three-axis magnetometer is an instrument that measures magnetic forces. Internal Apple software uses the instrument to position the phone's 360° orientation. Stud Find uses the magnetometer as a metal detector.
— enr.construction.com
Find it here in the app store. The reviews are mixed. View full entry
Builder confidence in the market for newly-built single-family homes hit a significant milestone in June, surging eight points to a reading of 52 on the National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index (HMI) released today. Any reading over 50 indicates that more builders view sales conditions as good than poor. — nahb.org
Crews that built the railing committed what experts called a basic mistake - they welded the bolts in place firmly in their slots rather than leaving a small amount of room to accommodate a natural expansion of the bicycle path that happens in hot weather.
As a result, scores of the 1-inch-diameter bolts have been sheared off along the 1.2-mile bike path on the southern side of the span's skyway section.
— sfgate.com
The biggest public transit infrastructure effort in the US is almost completely invisible — unless you’re 160 feet underground. The East Side Access project will connect the Long Island Railroad to New York’s Grand Central Terminal via a massive tunnel under the East River. Actually, that tunnel was the easy part; it was started in 1969. The hard part? “We are building a brand-new railroad here,” says Michael Horodniceanu, president of Metropolitan Transit Authority Capital Construction. — wired.com
Beautiful photographs by Dean Kaufman. To view more of his photos from this story, go to his website. View full entry
More than decade after Abbott's imaginative drawing, Eero Saarinen submitted a design for a gleaming metal curve to a competition, and the saga of the Arch began. Campbell, a history professor and the co-director of the Wendell Ford Public Policy Research Center at the University of Kentucky, joins Scott Simon to talk about the controversy around the design, the African-American residents who were displaced to build the Arch and whether the monument really symbolizes the opening of the West. — npr.org
Lootah said the project is a complete glass, transparent structure resembling a huge window frame intended to highlight the attractions of the city so visitors can view the skyscrapers on Shaikh Zayed Road from one side — symbolising modern Dubai — while the other side of the frame will show the old Dubai landmarks of Deira, Umm Hurair and Karama.
“The electrical panoramic elevators will help visitors move through its facilities as if they are moving in the sky inside the glass frame,”
— khaleejtimes.com
As some of you may remember, when the winner of the ThyssenKrupp Elevator Award was announced 3 years ago, there was quite a bit of controversy surrounding the selected winner. The winning entry, "Dubai Frame" by Fernando Donis of the Netherlands, was a 150m tall structure designed as a literal... View full entry
When I walked out to get breakfast this morning, clouds had obscured all but the topmost workings of the 1 World Trade Center site, visible through our living room window—a strange vision of machines, pulleys, cranes, and gears sort of hovering in the sky, like something out of Archigram by way of Hayao Miyazaki. — bldgblog.blogspot.com
The Ping’an Finance Center is planned to top out at 660m, making it not only China’s tallest building but the second-tallest building in the world after the Burj Dubai. 80m has been built so far, but construction has been halted in the wake of the revelation from Shenzhen’s Housing and Construction Bureau that substandard sea sand concrete had been used in its construction. — wired.com
