Uploaded by SouthKoreaOptimism on 23-08-2010

Burj Khalifa is known as Tower of Dubai
Built: 2004-2009 by Samsung Corporation
Cost: US$900,000,000.00
Designed by: Skidmore, Owings, & Merrill
Type: Skyscraper
Stories: 189
Maximum height: 2683 feet / 818 meters
Location: No. 1, Burj Dubai Boulevard, Dubai, United Arab Emirates

“The goal of the Burj Khalifa Tower is not simply to be the world’s highest building; it’s to embody the world’s highest aspirations. Such a project goal by necessity requires pushing current analysis, material, and construction technologies to literally new heights. However, as such a building height has never before been attempted, it is also necessary to ensure all technologies and methods utilized are of sound development and practice. As such, the designers sought to be able to use conventional systems, materials, and construction methods, modified and utilized in new capacities, to achieve such a lofty goal. The Tower is 828m in height, and is the world’s tallest building in all three categories defined by the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat. In fact, Burj Khalifa is approximately 319m taller than the previous record holder, Taipei 101 in Taiwan. The construction of the Tower began in January 2004, with its official opening occurring January 4, 2010. The Burj Khalifa Tower is the centerpiece of a $20 billion development located just outside of downtown Dubai. The project consists of the Tower itself, as well as an adjacent Podium structure, and separate 6-story Office Annex and 2-story Pool Annex. The 280,000 m2 reinforced concrete multi-use Tower is predominantly a residential and office usage, and also contains retail and a Giorgio Armani Hotel. The architects and engineers worked closely together from the beginning of the project to determine the shape of the Tower, in order to provide an efficient building in terms of its structural system and in its response to wind, while still maintaining the integrity of the initial design concept. The floor plan of the tower consists of a tri-axial, “Y` shaped plan, formed by having three separate wings connected to a central core. As the Tower rises, one wing at each tier sets back in a spiraling pattern, further emphasizing its height. In addition to its aesthetic and functional advantages, the spiraling “Y` shaped plan was also utilized to shape the Burj Khalifa to reduce the wind forces on the Tower, as well as to keep the structure simple and foster constructability. The structural system can be described as a “buttressed` core, and consists of high performance reinforced concrete wall construction. Each of the wings buttress the others via a six-sided central core, or hexagonal hub. Corridor walls extend from the central core to near the end of each wing, terminating in thickened hammer head walls. Perimeter columns and flat plate floor construction complete the system. At mechanical floors, outrigger walls are provided to link the perimeter columns to the interior wall system, allowing the perimeter columns to participate in the lateral load resistance of the structure; hence, all of the vertical concrete is utilized to support both gravity and lateral loads. The result is a tower that is extremely stiff laterally and torsionally. It is also a very efficient structure in that the gravity load resisting system has been utilized so as to maximize its use in resisting lateral loads. The top of the Tower consists of an approximately 230m tall structural steel spire, and the entire Tower is founded on a 3700mm thick reinforced concrete pile-supported raft foundation. ” - openbuildings.com

Watch an animation that explains how to use urban forests to fight air pollution and the urban heat island effect. See how cities can add in millions of trees.

image from Barbican Art Gallery

Yesterday, the Barbican Gallery in London hosted an interesting event with OMA.

“OMA Show & Tell” features all the of the firm’s partners: Rem Koolhaas, Victor van der Chijs, Reinier de Graaf, Ellen van Loon, Shohei Shigematsu (watch our interview with Shohei), Iyad Alsaka and David Gianotten.

The discussion was chaired by Chris Dercon, director of the Tate Modern, who makes a very good intro to this “historic evening“, in which the partners for the first time will discuss together how the creative practice has worked in the past and how it will work in the future. It includes questions from the 300 members of OMA.

It is interesting to see how the partnership works, and Dercon encourages the young architects in the audience to learn from it and speak to their CEOs to run their firms according to their views after this lecture.

Last Thursday, four globally renowned landscape and urban design teams converged on Minneapolis to present to the public their visions for the Minneapolis Riverfront Design Competition (MR|DC) at the Walker Art Center. The teams - Ken Smith Workshop (New York City), Stoss Landscape Urbanism (Boston), Tom Leader Studio (Berkeley), and Turenscape(Beijing) – each presented a multidimensional design proposal for 220 acres of parkland and surrounding communities along 5.5 miles of the Upper Riverfront in Minneapolis.

The Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board and the Minneapolis Parks Foundation, with creative partners the Walker Art Center and the University of Minnesota College of Design, sponsor the MR|DC. The largest design competition in Minneapolis history, the MR|DC builds on the Park Board’s award-winning 2000 Master Plan and is the first demonstration project of the Foundation’s “Next Generation of Parks” initiative.

Following are the design presentations of the four shortlisted firms:

TLS/KVA: RiverFirst

A set of inter-related design initiatives-focused on health, mobility and green economy-that function at multiple scales and are enhanced by community outreach strategies to raise public awareness about consumer choice impacts on the River system.

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Turenscape: The Resilient River

A fifty-year framework for investment that focuses on: ecological renewal, social equity, new economies and a new identity for the city of the river, and includes a strategic approach to ecological infrastructure, re-orienting urbanism and phasing over time.

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Stoss Landscape Urbanism: Streamlines

A longer-term transformation that reclaims the river as civic space, introduces new landscapes, infrastructure and urban fabrics, and weaves the multiple new and existing systems and experiences back into the city.

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Ken Smith: City of the River

The river is a catalyst for renewal through new and enhanced park, infrastructure and ecological systems and a series of bold, iconic design scenarios that reflect the area’s history and spirit of place.

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Beginning in February, the public is invited to peruse the design submissions at several locations. First, the Walker Art Center will present “Four Visions of the Minneapolis Riverfront,” a free, continuous screening of the design submissions and student work, in the US Bank Orientation Lounge in the Walker’s lobby, February 1-28. The University of Minnesota College of Design will also exhibit the submissions. For forthcoming details about this and additional locations, see the MR|DC website.

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Here is a video about one of Zaha Hadid‘s latest project, King Abdullah Petroleum Studies and Research Center (KAPSRC) in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.  This project has a holistic approach unifying architecture and engineering, landscape and building artist expression and environmental responsive design.  It is intended to not only be a leading research facility, but also a LEED Platinum certified building upon its completion.

We recently featured Zaha Hadid, as she won this years esteemed RIBA Stirling Prize for the design of the MAXXI National Museum in Rome. Full coverage of the RIBA Stirling Prize along with photographs of the MAXXI can be found here.

Also you can check our previous coverage of Saudi Arabai – in particular last year ArchDaily personally visited Saudi Arabia for the opening of the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, an international graduate-level research institution.  Photographs and a write up on KAUST here.

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‘This building by BIG is conceived as a reinterpretation of the historic Copenhagen tower, consisting of two elements: a base relating to the scale of the surrounding buildings, and a slim tower becoming a part of the skyline. The base houses shopping, conference center and the new Main Library of Copenhagen. The tower is a luxury hotel.
The tower and the base are morphed together in a spiral-shaped cascade of stairs leading to a public roof top plaza overlooking the City Hall square.’

Visible from the city’s Central Station, Town Hall Square and Tivoli Gardens, the project strives to extends the area’s vibrancy, with its mix of functions allowing for a variety of uses and users throughout the day. Even with the complexity of the twist from podium to tower, the design illustrates the direction for housing multiple functions in singular object, something that can be traced back to SOM’s 1969 John Hancock Center in Chicago. This is opposed to an approach that expresses each function individually, like REX’s proposal for Museum Plaza in Louisville, Kentucky.

BIG’s design addresses both its immediate context and the wider context of Copenhagen. The architects conceptually melded two types of towers present in the city: spiraling church spires and glass box office buildings. While created a hybrid via a particular response to the city’s skyline, the twisting shaft of the tower opens up immediate views to its surroundings on its raised public space. Steps (scala) from the street level (paralleling the library’s circulatiton underneath) provide access to the plaza, vertically aligned with the neighboring buildings.

The generous amount of outdoor space afforded to the public must be partially attributed to the city’s desire to house their Main Library within Scala Tower, as well as the architect’s response to the site and program that led them to house everything in one volume. Conceptually these two truly public spaces of the project (library and plaza) are mirrored about the steps leading from the street level, like two sides of a coin. While twisting towers have gained popularity since Turning Torso, this designs commendably uses that technique to link one public realm to another one.

For further information and pictures visit: www.big.dk.

Architect Daniel Libeskind (Photo by Marc Lostracco)

Architect Daniel Libeskind is profiled in this doc about the Denver Art Museum – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_GHm1Dmq1A

In 1989, Mr. Libeskind won the competition for the Jewish Museum Berlin, which opened to the public in September 2001 to wide public acclaim.  The city museum of Osnabrück, Germany, The Felix Nussbaum Haus, opened in July 1998.  In July 2002, the Imperial War Museum North in Manchester, England opened to the public.  Atelier Weil, a private atelier/gallery, opened in Mallorca, Spain in September 2003.  The Graduate Student Centre at the London Metropolitan University opened in March 2004, and the Danish Jewish Museum opened in Copenhagen in June 2004.  Tangent, an office tower for the Hyundai Development Corporation, opened in Seoul, Korea in February 2005, Memoria e Luce, a 9/11 memorial in Padua, Italy opened on September 11, 2005 and the Wohl Centre, Bar Ilan University, Tel Aviv, Israel; opened in October, 2005.  Most recently, the Frederic C. Hamilton building, Extension to the Denver Art Museum, alongside the Denver Museum Residences, in Colorado, opened in October 2006, The Extension to the Royal Ontario Museum, Canada, opened in June of 2007, and the Glass Courtyard, an extension to the Jewish Museum Berlin, which covers the original Courtyard, was completed in the Fall 2007. The Ascent at Roebling’s Bridge, a residential high-rise in Covington, Kentucky opened in March 2008.  The Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, California opened in June 2008 and Westside, the largest shopping and wellness center in Europe opened in October 2008, in Bern, Switzerland.

Several of Mr. Libeskind’s projects are currently under construction, including: the Military History Museum in Dresden, Germany; the Grand Canal Performing Arts Centre and Galleria in Dublin, Ireland; CityCenter, a retail complex, on the Las Vegas Strip in Nevada; Zlota 44; a residential high rise in Warsaw, Poland, and a grand piano design for Schimmel Piano is currently in production. Upon winning the World Trade Center design competition in February 2003, Daniel Libeskind was appointed as master plan architect for the site in New York City.  Memory Foundations is now under construction.

Mr. Libeskind has many other projects in design and planning, such as The New Center for Arts and Culture in Boston, Massachusetts; the L Tower and Sony Centre for the   Performing Arts in Toronto, Canada; the redevelopment of the historic Fiera Milano Fairgrounds in Milan, Italy; New Songdo City, in Incheon, South Korea; Haeundae Udong Hyundai l’Park in Busan, South Korea; a waterfront, residential development, Reflections, in Keppel Bay, Singapore;  Rejuvenation, a center for children in the Katrina-ravaged area of Gulfport, Mississippi; Editoriale Bresciana Tower in Brescia; and Orestad Downtown Master Site Plan, in Copenhagen, Denmark, which is a 5km development zone.

Mr. Libeskind has taught and lectured at many universities worldwide. He has held such positions as the Frank O. Gehry Chair at the University of Toronto, Professor at the Hochschule für Gestaltung, Karlsruhe, Germany, and the Cret Chair at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Louis Kahn Chair at Yale University. He has received numerous awards, including the 2001 Hiroshima Art Prize – an award given to an artist whose work promotes international understanding and peace, never before given to an architect. He was awarded the 1999 Deutsche Architekturpreis (German Architecture Prize) for the Jewish Museum Berlin; also the 2000 Goethe Medallion for cultural contribution; in 1996 the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Architecture and in the same year the Berlin Cultural Prize; in 1990 a membership in the European Academy of Arts and Letters; in 1997 an Honorary Doctorate from Humboldt Universität, Berlin; also in 1999 an Honorary Doctorate from the College of Arts and Humanities, Essex University, England; in 2002 an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Edinburgh and an Honorary Doctorate from DePaul University, Chicago, and most recently in 2004, an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Toronto. Two of Mr. Libeskind’s buildings won RIBA Awards in 2004, the London Metropolitan University Graduate Centre and the Imperial War Museum North, the latter of which was also nominated for the Stirling Prize. Also in 2004, Mr. Libeskind was appointed the first Cultural Ambassador for Architecture by the U.S. Department of State, as part of the CultureConnect Program.

Daniel Libeskind’s work has been exhibited extensively in major museums and galleries around the world and has also been the subject of numerous international publications in many languages.” – http://www.greatbuildings.com/cgi-bin/glk?http://www.daniel-libeskind.com/

Source: http://lh4.ggpht.com