MAGA STRUCTURE

On the ground floor, the double height atrium will be restored and a new grand staircase
introduced. A new Tea Lounge area will span the atrium and include a “Gallery” space some 23
metres in length, behind which there will be a new wine bar.
The restaurant, with private dining, will be located at the north west end of the building where a fully glazed extension overlooking the hotel’s private garden will provide a burst of natural light and green views, in contrast to the mainly “closed” public areas with their timber panelling, deep hues and working Pierre-Yves Rochon is responsible for the interior design concept schemes for both the public and guestroom floors with ReardonSmith handling the design development.
 At the first floor level, the north-west extension will provide an executive meeting room with 180 degree views towards Park Lane; there will be a series of other large meeting rooms equipped with state-of-the-art technology, and the ballroom is being totally refurbished to a high acoustic standard.  The eight floors of guestrooms above are all being re-configured to achieve a wide range of bedrooms and suites, including 53 rooms providing a large wet room rather than a bathroom with tub. There will be 20 Conservatory Suites and Guestrooms with four of the suites overlooking Hyde Park, each with a garden terrace. The roof of the northwest extension will provide a terrace for what will be the Four Seasons London’s new Executive Suite. The rooftop extension will create space for an ultra luxurious spa with separate areas for men and women and with a fitness suite and lounge alongside. Designed by Eric Parry Associates, the spa accommodated on the 10th floor of the Four Seasons London, will offer fabulous views across the city.The existing Portland stone building envelope is to be extensively refurbished and cleaned.

There will be all new lift cores, plant and new state-of-the-art back-of-house facilities. “Four Seasons as a brand is, of course, a benchmark for luxury hotels and the Park Lane hotel is particularly special because it was the first new build hotel for the group, announcing its global expansion beyond the Canadian base and helping to establish the blueprint for service, architecture and design that went on to become so valued across the world,” says James.Twomey, the ReardonSmith project director. “When the hotel re-opens, it will once again be one of the finest examples of a truly world-class hotel – with very chic and unique interiors and a building infrastructure to support impeccable service.”

Architects: Massimiliano & Doriana Fuksas
Location: Pescara, Italy
Client: De Cecco Spa

Structure: Studio Ing. Toniolo, Sirmione (BS)
Total area: 6,300 sqm
Budget: 20M Euro
Photographs: Moreno Maggi

The dynamic three-dimensional structure of the rounded building punches the straightforward structure of the “holed” lower volume, linking the two bodies in a whole element.


Natural light is brought to the office levels through the floor openings. The random position of these apertures creates diagonal views through levels.

The water plane at the sixth level recalls the river Pescara where the city takes its name, creating a perfect place to meet and rest.
These complex establishes itself as icon of early twenty first century architecture.

Three further gallery spaces are created as separate blocks within the building’s form. The Link Gallery features a fully glazed wall offering views across a reeded pond and its polished concrete floor, cast concrete walls and louvered concrete ceiling contrast dramatically with the luminescent white box interior of the Main Gallery. The Digital Gallery is a black box gallery designed to accommodate video art and installation. Dramatic arts are showcased in the George Bernard Shaw Theatre, located in the South West corner of the building.




Tags : modern architecture design

Dorobanti Tower is modern architecture and building project by Zaha Hadid Architects. The Dorobanti Tower is located in the centre of Bucharest, to the west of Piaza Romana, and approximately 6km south of the international airport. The brief called for a 100,000 square metre mixed-use development at the junction of Calea Dorobanti and St. Mihail Eminescu. The project comprises 34,000 square metres of a 5-star hotel (including restaurants and a convention centre) and 35,000 square metres of luxury apartments. Additionally, the scheme offers lower level retail areas of 4,600 square metres and it delivers a generous allocation of public realm. This public area will be unlike anything else in Bucharest, representing a major attraction within the dense urban character of the City, offering an important new meeting space and urban plaza.




Concrete filled steel profiles follow in sinus waves from the ground level to the top of the tower, creating a distinctive identity and complementing the tower design. The concrete filling will give additional strength to the structure and it will provide fire protection to the steel profiles. The facade structure adjusts to the building programme and to the structural forces. At the bottom, the façade grid has denser amplitudes according to the structural requirements for a tower of this height, providing the required load bearing capacity and stiffness to the structure. At the technical and recreation levels, the structure condenses creating almost solid knots. Additionally, the secondary structure supports the main steel frames. It also gives the 200m tower a human scale as the grid of the secondary frame structure reflects the floor heights. Furthermore, the secondary structure could be utilized to support additional glass panels as a shading device.

Technological Detail and Environmental Protection



1. Solar Energy System



The Shanghai Corporate Pavilion features a 1600m2 solar heat-collecting tube on the roof. These solar tube can collect solar energy to produce hot water up to 95°C. Ultra-low temperature power generation techology, a novel way to generate electricity through solar power. The power generated using this technology can be used for both the exposition and for every day.



2. Recycled Plastic materials
Shanghai produces nearly 30 million of waste CDs every year, and only 25% of them are reclaimed and recycled. If these CDs were reclaimed and washed, they could be used to produce polycarbonate granules and manufacture more polycarbonate plastic products. The external facade materials of the Shanghai Corporate Pavilion will use polycarbonate transparent plastic tubes to create its dreamlike appearance. After the Expo, also plastic tubes can be easily recycled to reduce social wastage.



3. Water/mist System



For the Shanghai Corporate pavilion, rainwater will be collected and recycled. After such treatment as sedimentation, filtration and storage, rainwater can be used for daily purposes at the pavilion and for the “mist” in particular. The mist can lower the temperature, purify the air and create a comfortable climate in pavilion. The spray can also be used to form various patterns under ceiling of entrance hall and make the overall appearance of the Shanghai Corporate Pavilion fresh and elegant

Designed by the Renzo Piano Workshop (in collaboration with FX Fowle Architects), the facade for the New York Times Building is a combination of glass curtain wall and elegant ceramic tubes.
Photo credit - Michel Denancé
By resisting easy temptations Renzo Piano has accomplished something rare: unstrained
When Renzo Piano won the invited competition to design a new building for the New York Times Company, the air was full of invective. Frank Gehry had been the front-runner—indeed some said the project had been promised to him before a mysterious conflict led him to withdraw—and the selection of his Italian rival was seen as a safe choice: the Times at its most stolid. No one doubted that the building would be decent—has Piano ever designed a bad one?—but hopes for a masterpiece were kept well in check.



That was exactly six years ago. And now after significant delay—attributable to financing woes and post?September 11 nerves—Piano’s 52-story tower is topped out and its distinctive exterior substantially complete. It rises over a difficult stretch of Eighth Avenue with all the taut propriety of the newspaper that will make a home in it. Bravo, Renzo.



Still, after all this time some doubting, mumpish pro-Gehry chatter remains. Was the nation’s paper of record too timid to build the design offered up by the reigning genius of American architecture, then in the full flush of his post-Bilbao stardom? Remember that Gehry tower-that-might-have-been. And if you can’t, call to mind his more recent New York work: “Miss Brooklyn” (the signature focal point for his mammoth Atlantic Yards project) or the mixed-use skyscraper planned for Beekman Street, in downtown Manhattan. With the exception of some pinstripes and the presence of an enormous Gothic-type NYT logo at its crown, the design he produced for the Times was much the same: a conventional skyscraper with a funny skin. Herbert Muschamp, who advised the selection committee, wrote that he liked the concept Piano developed with what was then Fox & Fowle—he declared it rational and classic, his second choice in a field that included Norman Foster and Cesar Pelli—but he was madly in love with the Gehry. The Times went with rational, and Piano has delivered a classic with grace, in a graceless corner of the city.



Lying just outside the particular zone of the Times Square business improvement district—where the public face of buildings must, by code as well as convention, speak loudly of the fun to be had within—that stretch of Eighth Avenue has come into the new century with all the pregentrified grit so much of Manhattan boasted in the last. Though there are a few new luxury residential towers stitched in among the ramps to the Lincoln Tunnel a few blocks west, and the new Penn Station in the old post office will likely lead to a general spruce-up of the area just to the south, very little of New York’s new spirit can be seen in the immediate vicinity of the Times tower, around the corner and a block south of the nonstop faux carnival of 42nd Street.



Piano’s building faces off against the brutish Port Authority bus terminal, directly opposite. The upper garage levels of that infamous street-spanning megastructure are distinguished by steel-beam crossbracing, a series of giant Xs marching up the avenue. As if in sympathy—and to resist the wind—the new tower uses the same motif on every floor of its side-street facades, elegantly rendered in steel cables that anchor into the main columns on alternate floors. Along with the much touted and elegantly realized ceramic-tube sun-breaks that rise to screen the full height of the building (diminishing in density at regular intervals to allow views out), the wind bracing gives the newspaper’s new home exactly the right airs to suit the earnest but forward- looking Times: it is businesslike without being boring, stable but not too staid.



The building also brings a quiet dignity to its lowly surroundings without importing to them the pixel-thin effects of Times Square. This is no place for that sort of gaiety, however easy it might be to reproduce, and Piano and his patrons were wise to buck local convention and find another way. People forget that the “Times” in Times Square is the New York Times. The paper preceded the square as we know it—and as it exists now, legislated into 24/7 celebration of itself. That history certainly gives the Times the right, if not the responsibility, to dig deeper than the glib for architectural expression. And in Piano it found one of the few architects working today who could pull it off.



Gehry’s much bemoaned design would have taken the easier course. His building was itself a sign, a tower seemingly enfolded in newsprint, with that cheeky Times logo on high to ram the point home. The architect might have proposed it for any site—so all-consuming and evolution averse is his personal vision—but here, a short hot-dog toss from the faux bawdy of 42nd Street, it would have looked a lot like the path of least resistance. While retaining all the familiar tics of his style, Gehry tried to say “New York Times” in the new language of the New Times Square: in signs and symbols, loudly but only on the surface. In contrast, the Piano design employs the very stuff of architecture—the same steel that makes the building stand, the glass that shields it—to create a whole that says, with appropriate rigor, the New York Times resides here, if you please.

Capital Gate, the iconic leaning building in Abu Dhabi, reached halfway point. The building, designed by international architects RMJM, will lean 18 degrees westward, 14 degrees more than the Leaning Tower of Pisa.




To make this possible, the central core of the building slants in the opposite direction to the lean of the structure, and it straightening as it grows. It sits on top of a 7-foot-deep concrete base with a dense mesh of reinforced steel. The steel exoskeleton known as the diagrid sits above an extensive distribution of 490 piles that have been drilled 100 feet underground to accommodate the gravitational, wind and seismic pressures caused by the lean of the building.
A gigantic internal atrium, including a tea lounge and swimming pool suspended 263 feet above the ground, has been constructed on the 17th and 18th floors, the halfway point of the 35-story, 525-foot tall tower.




Capital Gate will house Abu Dhabi’s first Hyatt hotel – Hyatt at Capital Centre, a presidential-style luxury, 5-star hotel and will provide 200 hotel rooms for Abu Dhabi and will serve ADNEC’s (Abu Dhabi National Exhibitions Company) visitors and exhibitors as well as international business and leisure travelers.

An architect firm in Bangkok, Aesthetics Architects mememangkan Go Group has a tender to build the Department of Agriculture building in Qatar (The minister of municipal affairs & agriculture / MMAA).

This building was inspired by cactus (cactus) is famous not easy to die even in arid areas or desert. Apart form it resembles a cactus tree, this building has a panel to protect the sunlight, which will automatically open or closed depending on the heat from the sun.

With this automatic panel (panel sunshade), this building can save electricity used because if the heat is too high in the panel will be automatically closed. On the side of the main building there is also a dome that will contain a variety of green plants, which make this building environmentally friendly.



Here are the pictures:

The ambitious design has called for 45,000t of unwrapped steel knitted in an intricate open-weave structure to form the gentle curving basis of the stadium. The final building will house 91,000 spectators, alongside shops, restaurants, cafes, bars and meeting spaces.

Zorlu Ecocity, a Llewelyn Davies Yeang project, has been planned as a ‘city within a city’. The project adheres to the original planning strategies of Istanbul of relieving the pressure on the city’s core by developing more urban centers in the entire Marma region. Zorlu Ecocity has been designed as a mixed-use development project, and would be located at the southern extremity of Buyukdere Street in Istanbul.

(more…)

Just imagine being a wind-powered home? Strange enough for us, but not for the residents of Mar del Plata in Argentina that will have its first wind-powered building, run entirely on wind power, without a slight use of thermal energy. What a great advancement, especially keeping in mind the current atmospheric profile of the earth, which is full of greenhouse gases emitted by coal and thermal resources.




Not only will the building run on wind energy but also save it for future use, for days without wind. A building zooming with ventilation and windmill over its head is the brainchild of two young entrepreneurs and designed by Mariani-Perez Maraviglia. The inhabitants of the wind-powered building will be able to save 15% of the expenses that they earlier used to incur on thermal energy. This way helping themselves save their hard-earned money and also doing a grand favor to the environment, which is sulking under the strain of global warming.



(more…)

In early July, Bustler reported that Steven Holl Architects’ “Linked Hybrid” towers in Beijing, China had been named 2009 “Best Tall Building” in the regional category ‘Asia & Australia’ by the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH). Award recipients had to possess seamless integration of architectural form, structure, and building systems, as well as exhibit sustainable design qualities working to preserve the quality of urban life.






[full article at link]

I like big cities. I also like interesting facts, geography, and statistics. Occasionally, I wondered what the biggest cities in the world are. Anyways, here is a picture that inpired me. At more than 500 metres, Taipei 101 in Taiwan is temporarily the world’s tallest building.


This is 700,000 tons of stress – and it “may have reopened an ancient earthquake fault.”

Data Project of GI




This The Project data Of GI

Data Project

Project Name : Grand Indonesia

Address : Jl. MH. Thamrin No. 1, Jakarta Pusat.

Developer : PT. Grand Indonesia

Architect Consultant : RTKL, Los Angeles, USA

Project Architect Consultant : PT. Anggara Architeam, Indonesia

Interior Design Consultant : Minktan Architects, Singapore

Lighting Design Consultant : PLD, Singapore

Landscape Design Consultant : Projects Pacific, Los Angeles, USA

Structure Consultant : PT. Rematha Daksa Optima

Structure & Finishing Contractor

: PT. Duta Graha Indah

PT. Totalindo Eka Persada

M&E Consultant : PT. Asdi Swasatya

PT. Metakom Pratama

Traffic Consultant : Wilbur Smith, Hongkong

PT. Pamintori Cipta Indonesia

Design Period : September 2003 – December 2004

Construction Period : August 2004 – February 2006 (by schedule)

Soft Opening : September 2006

Safeguarding asthmatics by tracking airborne pollutants. Keeping people warm with tiny fuel cells powered by body chemistry. Treating severed spinal cords by spurring nerves to regrow. Speeding healing by delivering light under bandages. Making better raincoats by mimicking the structure of plants.


These are possible applications of research by University scientists—research that is poised to reach a higher level as CUNY prepares for work to start on the technologically sophisticated and visually sparkling Advanced Science Research Center.
When it opens in 2012, ASRC's 200,000 square feet will house an estimated $40 million to $50 million worth of instrumentation ranging from functional magnetic resonance imaging equipment for studying brain activity to a rooftop observatory for studying the atmosphere.
Each floor of the $300 million ASRC will focus on one of five flagship areas recommended by a University-wide faculty task force: environmental sensing, nanotechnology, neuroscience, photonics and structural biology.
"We designed this research center to promote and encourage University-wide scientific collaboration," said Chancellor Matthew Goldstein. "Given the caliber of our professors and doctoral students, we expect that the ASRC will be a crucible for breakthroughs."
The new research building is the centerpiece of the Decade of Science (2005-2015), a comprehensive plan to position the University as a premier research institution. Investments include more than $1 billion for new facilities; "cluster hires" of more than 80 faculty members so far in key areas of science, technology, engineering and math; restructuring Ph.D. programs in sciences and engineering; boosting financial aid for doctoral students; and initiatives to train more teachers of middle- and high-school science and math. The Chancellor won funding for the ASRC in 2004 by convincing governmental leaders of the financial and scientific efficiency inherent in a single, shared facility for cutting-edge research rather than duplicate buildings on many campuses.
"This center will provide some of our most inspired scientists with powerful instrumentation that is far too expensive for any single campus to acquire and maintain," said Vice Chancellor for Research Gillian Small, who was appointed on July 1. She has managed the ASRC project since 2003 as University dean for research.
As the concept gained momentum, a faculty task force recommended areas of strength that could be leveraged for national prominence. "The goal was to identify areas where an investment now would still be of national and international importance 10 or 15 years from now," she said.
Faculty will apply to a peer committee to work in the labs. The goal will be tomaximize usage. Some researchers will need bench space for a day, while others will require space for themselves and/or graduate students or postdoctoral associates for a semester or longer.
"Our design mantra was 'loose fit, long life,' because we wanted to have flexible space and to change as technology changes," said Iris Weinshall, the vice chancellor for facilities planning, construction and management.
The ASRC, situated near the southern perimeter of City College's uptown Manhattan campus, will house about 50 professional staffers, including some 20 faculty members affiliated with a CUNY campus but whose grants will run through the facility, helping to fund its operations. An executive director will run the building and be its chief fundraiser. A nationally known scientist will direct each lab. Several Ph.D.-level scientists will assist visiting CUNY faculty members in each area to ensure optimal use of the equipment. And staff technicians will maintain the devices.
Some laboratory directors will bring their own research teams. That's the case with the first director to be recruited, Charles Vörösmarty, who is overseeing environmental sensing. He arrived in September with a small team, new hires and postdoctoral students from the University of New Hampshire's Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space, where he was a research full professor and directed its Water Systems Analysis Group. He joined the vigorous environmental sensing faculty at City College's Grove School of Engineering. Vörösmarty intends to make the ASRC a magnet for regional and national study of water and the environment.
Architects Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates of New York City designed the ASRC. Its glass façade will rise above a footing of gray brick that echoes the gray Manhattan schist that covers the neo-Gothic buildings on City College's north campus. Flad and Associates, a Wisconsin firm specializing in science facilities, is the architect of record on the project and designed the labs
Those firms als designed a companion four-story, 200,000-square-foot science research and instructional building for City College to supplement the college's Robert E. Marshak Hall, a 1960s structure that is under renovation.
Anticipating future needs, the University has commissioned preliminary design work on ASRC Phase II, an adjacent building of about the same size. Excavation of the bedrock beneath all three buildings will occur simultaneously, but the Phase II site will then be filled in to await construction. Removing all of the bedrock now will minimize future interference with sensitive instruments at the ASRC and City College building, as well as at the New York Structural Biology Center just a short distance away on the campus. The structural biology center is a consortium of research institutions including Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University, The City University of New York, Columbia University, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York University, The Rockefeller University, Wadsworth Center of the New York State Department of Health, the Joan and Sanford Weill Medical College of Cornell University and SUNY.

The 450-meter Petronas Towers, the tallest twin towers on the planet, pushed the outer limits of construction technology and stand as a symbol of Malaysian pride and modernity. But building the towers was a construction challenge like no other, and the six-year endeavor turned out to be a high-risk project with a hugely ambitious schedule.




Download Links



http://rapidshare.com/files/99496394/MS_Petronas_Inspired.part1.rar

http://rapidshare.com/files/99499467/MS_Petronas_Inspired.part2.rar

http://rapidshare.com/files/99502954/MS_Petronas_Inspired.part3.rar

http://rapidshare.com/files/99504419/MS_Petronas_Inspired.part4.rar

{Photo by Vida en Marte via flickr}
The land has been occupied by a wood and charcoal processing company since the Meiji era. In 1983 the company decided to erect a new structure to replace its aging offices but the city planners had already designated the space above the land as expressway area. Five years of negotiation produced this Solomonic compromise
A unique and elegant solution

A Santa Monica architect known for his high-rise designs is working on what may be the ultimate “spec” building — a 224-story skyscraper with green ambitions that would be the tallest structure in the world.

Two hundred and twenty-four story towers situated on man-made islands in desert regions are not “environmentally conscious.” Tacking next-generation solar panels, green roofs, insulated glass, and such does not make up for this fact; even if their combined energy output is more than the building’s usage after completion, the self-generated energy won’t begin to approach the massive amounts expended during construction or the inevitable tear-down.
Forgive me if I stated the obvious just now, but since the affable Tommy Landau (whose most impressive commission is the Clocktower Building’s renovation) is attempting to construct such a tower as his “swan song,” I find it necessary to do so. For his sake, I don’t want his parting gesture for this world to be what it really is: an expression of egotism and inadequacy for the tower’s group of would-be developers (I think I just stated the obvious again).


Apart from the supposed benefits of being known as the builder of the tallest building in the world, what possible justification is there for a 224-story tower (besides offices, shopping, and condos, of course)? Apart from being known as an architect who worships at the alter of altitude, as the true metric for beauty and innovation (and at the expense of “progress” and the welfare of everyone in the tower’s eventual vicinity), what possible justification is there for enabling the developers’ base impulses?


The worst part about Tommy Landau’s aspirations is that his creation would rise on the opposite side of the globe, which means he (along with the primarily US-based developers) wouldn’t bear witness to the tower’s destructive impact on Abu Dhabi’s built environment. Luckily the tower’s design is so vainly tall that the likelihood of its construction is tenuous to say the least.


Los Angeles Times: 224-story skyscraper would be high point for architect

Las Vegas is working hard to establish itself as even more of an international travel destination and will soon have another tool to lure in the tourists.




Come January, The Palazzo Las Vegas, will officially open its doors.



The new mega-resort is being built by Las Vegas Sands Corp. and is adjacent to The Venetian. Luxury seems to be the name of the game.



Comfort and convenience were the driving forces behind the design of every room in the all-suite hotel. Sunken living rooms, European-influenced décor, and marble-appointed baths are just a few of the standard luxuries offered.

Of all the men and women who had a hand in shaping Las Vegas, none have quite as prodigious as Steve Wynn.




From The Mirage to The Bellagio and Wynn Las Vegas, he’s come in and worked hard to class up the city from the gaudy, themed, family-friendly hotels of the 1990s. As good as he is for the city though, he may just be a little too progressively minded.



According to CasinoGamblingWeb.com, Wynn will no longer be comping drinks for people playing the video poker machines at the B Bar.*



Continue reading "Wynn Las Vegas balking at complimentary drink tradition"

I'd been sick the day before Oliver's birth and hadn't eaten anything at all for 24 hours during the labour, during which time I'd been standing up in the overly warm Delivery Room 1, attending to Celia. As a result, I actually collapse and black out, twice, and am rushed to A&E for a rapid-fire battery of tests. Again, I'll skip details, but after a anti-sickness jab I was able to eat some food, get an hour's kip and rejoin the labour. Celia is simply amazing, heroic, all the way through this, just as she had been during pregnancy and just as she continues to be.




But such is the seriousness of the situation at the time, in order to get from Elizabeth Garrett Anderson to the A&E at the adjoining main UCLH building, I travel in an ambulance. Ludicrously, the one-way system around UCLH, and its dense traffic, means the hospital journey takes 10 minutes, even though it is 100 metres away. This is a condition often experienced in London traffic, a distortion of space and time that would be fascinating were it not so irritating. Most Londoners will have experienced the sheer helpless frustration of being stuck in a tunnel on the tube, unable to just get out and walk. Few 'urban transport solutions' place the passengers in such a futile position as London's extremely deep tube. I didn't think it at the time, but being strapped to a stretcher in the back of an ambulance was essentially the same condition as travelling underground. London's transport can just enfeeble sometimes. Were Londoners a more sensible, calm people, these delays might induce a zen-like state throughout the city, as people enjoy the enforced meditation. Though if they were a more sensible, calm people, they wouldn't have got things into this mess in the first place.



Wired to the wall in UCLH, with tubes emerging from my hand and tiny heart-trace monitors stuck all over my body, I realised we'd been in the new UCLH building before, for a scans 6 weeks and at 20 weeks. It's a giant complex, replacing an entire series of hospital buildings in central London, including the old Middlesex Hospital at Mortimer Street (originally founded 1745; rebuilt 1928) that S used to work at, several floors underground.



The new UCLH rises at the top of Gower Street in green and white, as if dressed in surgical robes. I'm not a huge fan of the building. Strapped to its wall, I begin to feel at one with it, but that's quite different.

What really lets the place down is the service design job, or rather, lack of it. It's as if the contractors left the building once the basic structure had been done. After that, little care appears to have been given to use of space, signage, design of systems etc. The food in vending machines is uniformly terrible - how can a hospital be selling crisps, fizzy drinks, powdered soups and chocolate bars? There are fabulous views east from the floor-to-ceiling window by the lifts, but a bizarrely hidden door entry system to the Early Pregnancy Unit 10 paces in the other direction. The 'Enter' button is actually positioned around a wall, away from the door. Moreover, the receptionist on the other side has to leave her chair to press the 'door open' button. When you're at the EPU reception, there is only room for 3 people to sit. On the mornings we'd there, months before, there were 10 or 12 waiting for an appointment, so we have to overflow into an unused seminar room opposite, arranging the chairs into an impromptu waiting room. Another morning, however, this seminar room is in use. For a seminar. So we stand, or sit in the ward itself, as bed-ridden patients have consultations around us. On one occasion, we have to sit in a storage cupboard to wait to receive some results. And this, in an area allegedly designed for pregnant women. There were several other system faults that are really too tiresome to explain.

At Cube, a 24 story condominium project in the Design District in Miami Florida shown below, we are using an exposed steel structural frame. In Archicad 9, the exterior steel structure of the building was generated using the add-on application, TrussMaker. I was going to demonstrate how this was done, but now with ArchiCAD 10, it is no longer necessary to use this tool for this purpose. I will show how a portion of this repeating structure can be modeled in ArchiCAD 10.First, set up a folder in the View Map where the relevant views for this modeling exercise can be accessed rapidly. Give it a descriptive name and using the Organizer, drop a floor plan, a study section and a perspective view, so you can quickly move between these.

In ArchiCAD 10, the profile of a beam can be specified before modeling it with the Beam tool. Access the Beam Selection Settings dialog, click on the Profile icon, and select the profile HP Steel Section. Draw a couple of beams in the floor plan view; we will be moving these later to the correct location in the plan and elevation views. Do the same with the Column tool.

Going to the study section view, we can see the library part that was originally done with TrussMaker and is now going to be replaced by elements created directly with the Beam tool. We can see the horizontal beam, the sloping beam, and the column, both in the section view as well as in the perspective view



Carlos Ramos is registered to practice architecture in the state of Florida, and a partner in Oppenheim Architecture and Design. He has been using ArchiCAD since version 6.5.

Thierry Bievre, the general director of the contractor, company Elithis Engineering, has suggested to create technically advanced building at preservation of level of the expenses necessary for building of traditional structure. To cooperation over the project he has invited the well-known architect, Jean-Marie Charpentier (Arte Charpentier Architects).
The standard of ecological cleanliness
Thanks to joint efforts, the group has created a building a total area of 5,000 sq.m., height of 10 floors which has represented the sample and possibilities of a combination of requirements of an aesthetics, city integration, comfort, energy and ecology

A group of ‘designers’ that I think are breaking new ground is the Mayor’s Office of Sustainability in Philadelphia. They are working with Mayor Nutter to make Philly the “greenest city in America”. They are working in collaboration with dozens of city agencies and other organizations to help guide their work in the years to come.
They are pushing the boundaries because they are trying to make a change that’s hopefully city-wide, which could influence other cities to follow. They are looking to, and in the process of, reducing emissions, developing green spaces, and creating new storm water management solutions. Not only does Philly already boast the nations tallest ‘green’ structure (Comcast Center) but Philadelphia will also soon be a leader in solar energy production with the development of a solar system in Bucks County.
The participation of the communities in Philadelphia is critical for their plans to work. People living in Philly are encouraged to recycle and collect rain. If you are located within a watershed area in Philly you can receive a rain collection barrel for free. Not only does it save the resident money on their water bill but it also helps keep the sewers from overflowing when storms hit. The city is also promoting other ways of travel other than car, such as public transportation or bicycles. The city has recently devoted one lane on two streets in center city to bicycle traffic, running east to west from the Deleware to the Schuykill.
There’s another initiative going on called TreeVitalize, which is pretty much what it sounds like, revitalizing the city with trees. Adding more trees will beautify the city, create cleaner air, and also help with the water levels.
Some plans from the Office of Sustainability are easily and immediately implemented but others may take much longer, for example the proposed plan for the Deleware River which would include; 7-mile long trail along central river front, new parks and improving existing ones, easier access to river, creating greenways along the rivers edge, and to create a natural rivers edge and restore the habitat.
Philadelphia is full of people willing and ready to make the changes necessary to make a more sustainable city, these people paired with the Office of Sustainability and hopefully we’ll soon become a city for others to model themselves after.

Chris Mufalli

www.phila.gov/green
www.phillywatershed.org/rainbarrel
www.pennsylvaniahorticulturalsociety.com
www.planphilly.com/actionplan