The Construction of Tall Buildings Industry in the GCC

In our previous article on Architecture of Tall Buildings published on April 13, 2015,  we elaborated on this segment of the construction of tall buildings industry in the GCC and its evolution.  Far from questioning the ‘raison d’etre’ or the real need for such structures, we would like to make here as close to reality a statement of what has been achieved on the ground last year.

Abraj Quartier-Commercial Towers picture (Credit to UDC) is featured above.

Indeed, in 2016, a record of 128 buildings were completed worldwide, according to the the Chicago-based council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH)’s Year in Review: Tall Trends of 2016.

It says :

Dubai’s twisting Cayan Tower named among world’s best new skyscrapers

While Africa has yet to see a 200-meter-plus completion since 1973, the Middle East ended the year, for the second time, with nine such completions. This continues a steady trend of completions in the region, but pales in comparison to its all-time high of 23 in 2011, a spike that was attributed to a global post-recession recovery in tall building construction. 2016 was the first year since 2006 that the Middle East has not seen the completion of a supertall (300-plus-meter) building, but one should be wary of assuming that this is indicative of a regional swing away from the supertall height threshold. Optimistic projections show as many as nine supertall buildings completing in the Middle East in 2017.

In an unusual turn, the United Arab Emirates did not have the greatest number of completions in the region for the year. That accomplishment belongs to Qatar, which saw four towers completed in 2016. The UAE followed with just two completions, and Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Bahrain tied with one completion each. The tallest building to complete in 2016 in the Middle East is Regent Emirates Pearl, a 255-meter tower in Abu Dhabi that twists along its height at a rate of approximately 0.481 degrees per floor. The tower was featured in the online version of the CTBUH Tall Buildings in Numbers study.

Consequent to the reduction in petro-Dollars revenues, a certain slowdown has been noticeable in the region’s construction industry dynamics.  Qatar nevertheless led last year the region in building tall towers. The report states that in 2016 that country has managed and for the first time to lead the region by completing four tall buildings.

This report however mentioned that in a decade no “super tall” buildings (300m+) did come to be built anywhere in the region.

Worldwide, China led with 84 projects of tall buildings completed closely followed by the USA follows with seven and South Korea with six.  Indonesia is fourth with five buildings and the Philippines and Qatar coming up with four towers each are fifth.

This slowdown in the MENA where last year no ‘super-tall’ towers as per the local media were produced, was commented by the CTBUH as this doesn’t mean the era of tall towers is over for the Middle East.

Abu Dhabi’s Burj Mohammed bin Rashid named best tall building in Middle East and Africa

Speaking to the National, a UAE daily, earlier this month, one financial expert explained this state of affairs.

“Previously, this region hadn’t been quite so sensitive as to whether numbers stacked up. It’s been a case of build it and they will come, but as liquidity tightened the numbers needed to work.”

And that :

“One should be wary of assuming that this is indicative of a regional swing away from the super-tall height threshold. Optimistic projections show as many as nine super-tall buildings completing in the Middle East in 2017.”

Santiago Calatrava’s Dubai Creek Harbour World’s tallest observation tower project

The Sustainable City of Ksar of Tafilelt of Beni-Isguen story

The Sustainable City of Ksar of Tafilelt of Beni-Isguen story was known to the local people since its inception.  It has been rewarded last Monday in Marrakech, Morocco, by the 1st Sustainable City Prize, following an online vote called “Internet’s users Favourite City”, the Algerian Press Service (APS) reported on Wednesday citing officials of the Amidoul Foundation, initiator of the Ksar.

Amidoul Association    A very special human experience, by its social, urban and ecological approaches . . .

The Ksar of Tafilelt, which was regarded as a very human experience in the northern edge of the Sahara and an eco-city in the desert, had more than 600 votes of the built environment professionals of the world, for having combined architecture, sustainable development, preservation of the environment and local lifestyle, said Moussa Amara, the Project Manager of the Ksar of Tafilelt.

This consecration was obtained as a result of the first edition of the Green City Solutions Awards competition, organized by the network Construction 21 that campaigns for the promotion of building and development of innovative and sustainable urban districts, at the COP 22 of Marrakech, as informed by Dr. Ahmed Nouh, president of the Amidoul Foundation.

The Ksar of Tafilelt has also been ranked second for the Grand Prize of the Sustainable City by an international jury, which considered it an example to follow and replicate in Algeria and elsewhere, said Dr. Nouh.

The ceremony of trophy handing over to the representatives of the Amidoul Foundation took place in Marrakech in presence of official delegations of the sector of water resources and the environment.

The Ksar of Tafilelt had already obtained, the first Arab League Prize for the environment in 2014 in the same city of Marrakech, Morocco.

Launched in 1997, this new Ksar, laid on a rocky 22 hectares site, provides 1,050 houses.  It was designed for a better quality of life as based on the ancestral interpretation of the architectural heritage and the preservation of the local environment.  It nestles on the top of a plateau that overlooks Beni Isguen palm grove and the M’Zab Valley.

Ksar Tafilelt nestles on the top of a plateau that overlooks Beni Isguen palmgrove and the M’Zab Valley

The initiators of the project made use of local materials (stone, lime and Palm trees wood) for the construction of the city buildings and amenities all as inspired by the surrounding Ksars’ old construction of the M’zab but combined with modernity in the houses interior.

New Ksar of Tafilelt is part of an ecological and social program as inspired by ancestral heritage contained in traditional Ksour of M’zab Valley classified in 1982 as universal heritage by UNESCO.

The experience of the Ksar of Tafilelt is considered by many specialists in the building industry as a reference in the preservation of architectural heritage combined with modernity, comfort and the bioclimatic and ecology.

Its initiators are working to implement the unique strategies for management of household waste, intensification and conservation of green areas, purification organic wastewater of the city as well as the agrementation of the daily life of the people by creating a park animal and plant of desert areas and natural.  The vision that prevailed in the construction of this city whose special feature is the community spirit that motivated it, stems from the will to build integrated urban projects, sustainable, based on precise needs knowledge and the choice of solutions to outdoor areas to strengthen social cohesion.

They committed themselves to carry out all the work of household waste management by establishing a system of fixed collection and a system of recovery and recycling of waste, the creation of a system of biological treatment wastewater by macrophytes herbal plants and a solar public lighting system.

For more information, click here .

Translation from French by Microsoft / FaroL  faro@farolco.onmicrosoft.com .

Zaha Hadid to design Forest Greens Rovers new Grounds

Zaha Hadid to design Forest Greens Rovers new Grounds.  In the Touching story about an all-girl school  and published on April 6^th, 2016 in this site, the whole life of Zaha was summarily but brilliantly described by our colleague Lee Light.  She elaborated on the life and achievements of “the first woman and the first Muslim to receive the Pritzker Architecture Prize, winning it in 2004. She received the Stirling Prize in 2010 and 2011. In 2012, she was created a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire and in 2015 she became the first woman to be awarded the RIBA Gold Medal.  A partial list of her life-time projects and awards are listed on Wikipedia. No doubt she had more on the drafting board in her London office of 400 employees.  As these projects come to completion, her list will continue to grow post posthumously, one of which is proposed here.  

We reproduce this article of ecobuild which is the UK’s largest and number one event for specifiers across the built environment. No other UK event attracts 33,319 high calibre, senior level decision makers and influencers from architects and developers to local government and major infrastructure clients.

ZAHA HADID TO DESIGN NEW GROUND FOR FOREST GREEN ROVERS

Non-league side Forest Green Rovers has picked a design by Zaha Hadid Architects for the team’s new 5,000-seat stadium.

The practice’s winning proposal for the structure is “almost entirely made of wood” to meet a zero-carbon/carbon-negative brief from green energy firm Ecotricity, the National League club’s majority shareholder.

Its design trumped a rival bid from Glenn Howells Architects after an international competition whittled a shortlist of nine down to the two finalists.

Earlier this year, Howells won the RIBA South West Award for the Gloucester Services “eco service station” a few miles north of the proposed stadium site, which is adjacent to the M5 motorway west of Stroud.

The stadium is earmarked as the centrepiece of a proposed 40ha Eco Park, to be split 50:50 between sports and sports-science use and green technology. Zaha Hadid Architects director Jim Heverin said the stadium’s “continuous spectator bowl” would maximise matchday atmosphere and provide all seats with clear sightlines to the pitch.

“Forest Green Rovers’ new stadium and Eco Park aims to be carbon neutral or carbon negative, including measures such as the provision of on-site renewable energy generation,” he said.

“The buildings on the site, and their embodied energy, play a substantial role in achieving this ambitious target and demonstrate sustainable architecture can be dynamic and beautiful.”

Ecotricity founder and Forest Green Rovers chairman Dale Vince said the standout feature of the winning stadium was that it was “going to be almost entirely made of wood” which he said would be a world-first.

“We’re thrilled with the concept and the amount of thought Zaha Hadid put into their design – their experience of stadia design and their ability to put environmental issues at the heart of what they do really stood out,” he said.

“They took a really challenging brief, ran with it, and have given us an iconic and original new stadium.

“The importance of using wood is not only that it’s a naturally occurring material, it has very low carbon content – about as low as it gets for a building material. It’s why our new stadium will have the lowest carbon content of any stadium in the world.”

Vince also praised the Glenn Howells runner-up design as “exceptional” and pledged to work with the practice on future projects.

Forest Green was founded in 1889 and is the longest serving member of the National League – the fifth highest of the English football league.

Further reading is in New lawn, new dawn: Zaha Hadid Architects designs all-wood stadium for UK soccer minnows Forest Green Rovers

 

How to build a £10,000 House?

How to build a £10,000 House?  Prefabricated house, self-build, surface reduced… the solutions exist.  The vision, in this article, is certainly not the perception that most owners of what must be a decent and respectable house, i.e.: large, spacious, stone and on a large plot of land have.  However for more than 90% of the world’s population, the reality is quite different; buildable green fields becoming rarer near workplaces if inexistent altogether, for instance in the UK and if ever there were any, they would be so expensive. 

But for this new trend of micro and / or mini dwellings, the buildable surface is reduced to a minimum, for the obvious lowering of all costs and therefore that of allowing the first time buyers to purchase and enter the market.  The micro-apartment as elaborated on by most designers can also be combined into apartment blocks as brought to under the spotlight by Newsweek’s Jonathan Glancey on October 16^th, 2016.

 

Are Micro-Apartments Innovative Solutions for Cities or Future Slums?

 

Soon enough, short of some last-minute appeal on behalf of protesters, Brill Place Tower will be shooting up from a site in Somers Town, a slightly neglected district just north of St. Pancras station in central London. The 25-story building is actually a pencil-thin pair of what dRMM, its inventive young architects, call micro-towers, built on a footprint of just 3,767 square feet. It was granted planning permission this summer, as part of a £1 billion ($1.22 billion) regeneration plan backed by Sadiq Khan, London’s populist new mayor.

Historic England, a largely government-funded heritage group, is opposed to the tower, perhaps because, like a skinny catwalk model stamping on a wedding cake, it will pierce the neoclassical skyline of white stucco terraces that encircle Regent’s Park. But whatever your architectural taste, Brill Place is very much a sign of the times. It will hold 54 of what planners call “units,” a mixture of cunningly laid out one- and two-bedroom apartments. It’s a wholly commercial development, so you can bet none of them will be cheap, although, according to dRMM, the smallest of its one-bedroom units will cover just 590 square feet. (It’s not clear if the architects include the apartment’s balcony in that calculation.) These micro-towers will hold some microhomes.

Compared with some, though, they’re palatial. In Kips Bay in Manhattan, residents paying at least $2,650 a month recently moved into New York City’s first micro-apartment building—Carmel Place, nine stories of prefabricated steel and concrete studio units, sheathed in a facade of gray bricks. Designed by nArchitects, the project is the first fruit of former Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s New Housing Marketplace Plan—a scheme launched in 2004 and intended to create 165,000 affordable homes for low- and middle-income New Yorkers. Carmel Place features 55 rental units, most of them just 260 square feet in size.

The building’s floor plans are fairly ingenious, managing to squeeze in enough room for a sofa bed, a tiny table and a narrow area of storage above the shower room and kitchen. But, like shrunken versions of the old downtown railroad apartments, they’re more corridor than home. Carmel Place does feature a gym, a shared roof terrace, a lounge and a garden, storage for bicycles and a “butler service” to replenish empty fridges. But this communal, city-center style of living is really suitable only for the young and single: Few families, however close-knit, would attempt to squeeze into such limited space.

Why Carmel Place is important has less to do with its detailed design and prefabricated factory construction than the fact that it has revolutionized planning in Manhattan: Until now, local legislation prevailed against such tiny homes. In Seattle, meanwhile, developers have been building micro-apartments as small as 199 square feet.

The philosophy, or sales pitch, behind this extreme degree of minimal living is that the city itself, with its bars, cafés and youthful culture, serves as all the other spaces a young person might need or want. It’s an inescapable truth that, as cities across the world grow exponentially, huge numbers of new homes are needed, for the young, for service-industry workers who otherwise would be forced to live ever farther afield, for downsizing retirees and for professionals seeking city-center pieds-à-terre. No wonder, then, that towers of micro-apartments are catching on with planners, developers, architects and the property-hungry public.

Micro-living Failures

We have been here before. Although very much back in vogue, experiments in micro-living have been made several times over the past 90 years, and the results, while fascinating, are not exactly encouraging. In the late 1960s, Tokyo boomed, and as it did, young people and modest “salary men” and their families sought affordable homes in sprawling new suburbs, commuting to the city center in the famously jam-packed Metro trains.

The late Kisho Kurokawa, then a radically minded 30-something architect, had an answer to the problem of this mass exodus of the young from Tokyo. This was his Nakagin Capsule Tower—although it was, like Brill Place, a pair of towers—completed in 1972 in the Shimbashi neighborhood. Prefabricated steel capsules, 140 of them, were bolted onto the two central concrete shafts. Each capsule provided a 94-square-foot space, into which was squeezed a bed, a kitchen surface, an aircraft-sized bathroom and the very latest in Japanese audio technology.

Nurtured in an era of minicars, miniskirts and the widespread belief that technological progress was wholly benevolent, Nakagin Capsule Tower was a much-feted, much-photographed revelation. Today, while the rest of Shimbashi is filled with expensive offices, the tower is in a sorry state. There has been no hot water here for some years. Rather than chic and futuristic micro-apartments, most of the capsules are boarded up or used for storage or as makeshift offices; a few capsules are available to rent through Airbnb. Residents wanted more space than Kurokawa could possibly offer, and although the plan had been for the capsules to be unbolted and replaced every 25 years, it failed: It was always going to be cheaper to demolish the towers and build anew, than go through all the palaver of replacing its intricate nest of high-tech capsules. This Japanese model of mass-produced city housing remains a custom-made novelty loved by architects, but shunned by the residential property market.

Even sorrier than the Nakagin Capsule Tower is the state of Moscow’s compelling Narkomfin apartment block, completed in 1932 to designs by Moisei Ginzburg and Ignaty Milinis. Here were tiny modern movement apartments served by communal kitchens, a laundry, a library, a gym and a roof terrace. This was to be a model of socialist living. Feminist living too. “Petty housework crushes, strangles and degrades,” wrote Vladimir Lenin in his essay “A Great Beginning,” saying it “chains her [the housewife of the capitalist era] to the kitchen. The real emancipation of women, real communism, will begin only where and when an all-out struggle begins…against this petty housekeeping.”

A rendering of the Brill Place Tower.   DRMM

 Stalin, however, put a sudden end to what he called such “Trotskyite” aberrations. Almost as soon as the first residents—some of whom installed their own tiny kitchens—moved in, the Narkomfin experiment of communal living was condemned, with rooms becoming individual, disconnected family units. Now a tarnished ragbag of empty apartments, artists’ studios and various oddball enterprises, the Narkomfin Building stands in the shadow of shiny new apartments. When, in 2004, Yuri Luzhkov, the former mayor of Moscow, opened the grotesque, 100,000-square-foot Novinsky Passage Mall, he is reputed to have said, while pointing to Ginzburg and Milinis’s yellowing masterpiece, “What a joy that in our city such wonderful new shopping centers are appearing—not such junk.”

From Junk to Trash

In spite of these failed monuments to capsule living, idealistic urban planners and architects press ahead. There’s a distinct echo of the Tokyo project in a new proposal from Jeff Wilson, a former associate professor of environmental studies at Huston-Tillotson University in Austin, Texas. Wilson is perhaps best known for living for parts of 2014 and 2015 in a 33-square-foot dumpster converted into the tiniest and most unlikely home of all, but his latest project is more mobile. Called Kasita—from casita, Spanish for “little house”—it’s a proposal for prefabricated, 322-square-foot steel studios that can be slotted into a steel frame like bottles into a wine rack. The idea is that, should a resident want to move, it will be easy to lift these thoroughly equipped microapartments out from the rack and, with the help of cranes and a flatbed truck, transport them to a new location equipped with an identical steel rack.

This notion of moving home—your physical home—is certainly intriguing, although you might choose, as many American retirees have done, to invest in a motor home instead. It does highlight, however, one of the major criticisms of microliving, whether in Somers Town, Manhattan, Seattle or Texas. While tiny spaces might appeal to the young and single, what happens if a young single person meets another single young person and they produce a family?

Odds are, many will leave their micro-apartments, resulting in ever-shifting urban populations. Transience is one of the enemies of enduring communities. The more micro-apartments and towers there are, the more unsettled our city centers might become.

Will the latest wave of micro-apartments get the Luzhkov treatment and become the city slums of the future? Micro-towers may well be signs of the times, yet times change, and for most people, 260 square feet will never be quite enough.

Amman celebrates first Design Week

Al Jazeera produced this programme titled “Amman celebrates first Design Week” and published it on September 9^th, 2016

Design Week was a festival of juxtapositions, with different disciplines, backgrounds and styles joining together to create new possibilities in a place where design is still finding its feet.  It was held in the Jordanian capital across three major locations, and was a celebration of the city’s blossoming arts and design scene.

100+ exhibitors took part in this show, with renowned artists and architects from across the Arab world.  Organisers explored the links between contemporary and traditional Jordanian crafts, while revitalising disused spaces as creative hubs. Ordinary people who create art in their spare time were exhibited alongside international designers.

As per the UN HABITAT  Jordan is growing quickly. With high rates of population growth and a unique geography, Jordan is faced with both unprecedented challenges in managing the country’s lands and development and also offered exceptional opportunities in revitalizing the Kingdom. Jordan is one of the smallest and poorest economies in the Middle East, with 14 percent of Jordanians living below the poverty line. The country suffers from structural unemployment, as the economy fails to absorb the annual inflow of new job seekers. Moreover, Jordan’s active-to-total population ratio is one of the lowest in the world, with an average of four non-active individuals depending on a single worker. Unless this situation is reversed, significant economic growth and wealth will be difficult to achieve. With the current population growth rate and the economic status-quo, unemployment rates could well exceed 20 percent and could account for over half a million unemployed in the coming ten to fifteen years.

Added to the above is the recent influx of Syrians refugees of whom a certain percent managed to reach Amman to live in conditions that are far from any known standards.

The following article of Bethan Staton was posted on September 23^rd, 2016.  It dwells on matter of urban design whilst looking at the Design Festival of Amman.  In fact, all participating artists hoped that Design Week, held in venues have long been neglected, would revive those empty spaces that AMMAN, the capital would need.

Azra Aksamija’s Memory Matrix

 

Hashem Joucka combined digital technologies

Can design festival revolutionize Amman’s urban landscape?

When Rana Beiruti first visited the Raghadan Tourist Terminal in downtown Amman, she was intrigued by its story. A huge shopping center and transport hub, established in 2006 with spacious walkways and courtyards and a stone’s throw from the city’s ancient Roman amphitheater, it seemed the kind of space that Amman needed. But the venue had remained empty for years, a problem locals blame on poor planning.

“It’s an incredible area, and it’s got to be used,” Beiruti told Al-Monitor. “I always had it in my mind.”

In the first two weeks of September, the young curator’s hopes for the neglected space were realized. The Raghadan area was transformed into a crafts district filled with local pop-up stores, boutique eateries and art installations. During Sept. 1-9, the once empty space was thronged with visitors and decked out with color and sound.

The Raghadan Tourist Terminal, curated by Jordanian artist Dina Haddadin, was one of three main venues for Amman Design Week, which featured more than 100 artists in three main sites and dozens of smaller venues. The event gave a platform for the kingdom’s creativity. But it also revitalized places that were once forgotten, reactivating public space and turning Amman’s downtown into a cultural hub.

Imagined by organizers as “nodes” in a citywide network, the week’s major venues were all spaces that, historically, had been underused or neglected. Some 2 kilometers (roughly 1 mile) away from the Raghadan, is the Jordan Museum, an ambitious development of exhibitions showcasing the nation’s history — but that few in the country have visited. Nearby is a warehouse. Built in the 1930s to house Amman’s electricity generators, it was recently converted into a cavernous exhibition hall. The Hangar, as it’s affectionately called, has been a regeneration success, hosting conferences and concerts. During Design Week it was filled with the work of designers and artists from the region.

“They put a twist on the sites, which is really nice to see,” Nicole Shaheen, a 34-year-old local, told Al-Monitor as she explored exhibits. “Without certain attractions like this, you don’t have people coming to the places. But it shows how well they could be used for different things.”

For creatives and planners in Jordan, there is a special reason to be conscious of how events interact with the urban landscape. Amman is a city with a population that, according to 2016 government figures, has doubled in a decade, with a sizable number — some 174,000 Syrians by United Nations estimates — of refugees. There is a much-spoken-of divide between the wealthier west and poorer east of the city — areas roughly divided by a downtown area in a valley surrounded with steep slopes of vertiginous, crowded houses. Most of these neighborhoods are on the poorer side of the city’s economic divide, far from the luxury developments and diplomatic quarters in the west of Amman.

Though the center of downtown is packed, other areas — like the Raghadan — haven’t become the urban hubs some hoped for. The zone between the Hangar and the Jordan Museum is an area with untapped potential: a pleasant stretch of paved walkways, planted with flower gardens, surrounding a cultural center and a mosque. Yet at Design Week, many attendees and organizers told Al-Monitor they were surprised to learn that the area, known as Ras al-Ayn, had been developed at all.

The team behind Design Week wanted to address that knowledge gap. “We are reactivating these spaces that had been neglected before,” Beiruti said. “We wanted it to be a celebration of the city and for people to feel reconnected to their city.”

The way to do that, the team believed, was through programming. For the entire week, the Raghadan and Ras al-Ayn — along with other venues like art galleries, stores and cafes around the city — hosted workshops, talks and activities. In addition to exhibitions of local and international work, interactive installations invited Ammanis to learn 3-D printing or local crafts, and music performances were scheduled during evenings. On the walkway between spaces, rotating pop-up restaurants showcased food and became a space to linger. Suddenly, people had reason to visit the spaces, and a reason to stay.

“One of the most successful things about Amman Design Week has been to bring people down here, to make it accessible and free,” Ahmed Humeid, the head of a local design firm who delivered a talk at the Jordan Museum, told Al-Monitor. “It’s a statement: It should be a city for pedestrians. They created something in the city that was really refreshing.”

Humeid is especially invested in the relationship between design and the cityscape. He is one of the creators of Amman’s unofficial transport map, a graphic rendering of the city’s formidably tangled system of buses and shared taxis. In a notoriously car-centric city, this map is a crucial tool for those using public transport. But for Humeid, the map is also about using design as direct action. It showed the local municipality that some of the perennial problems of Amman’s cityscape could be tackled. It compelled them to take action themselves.

Design Week might just do the same. Amman’s local government cooperated in executing the festival, and a team of researchers committed to surveying the community about the changes they wanted to see. Those developments were often small: a free bus trundled through the festival’s downtown venues, and pedestrian crossings were painted on roads. But organizers hope those small tweaks will make a difference.

As the festival closed up, however, the challenge was just beginning. Urban design in Amman has a tendency to falter, a fact borne out by the landscape of underused buildings like the Raghadan. Now the life created by the festival has to keep going if venues aren’t to fall back into disuse.

“It is positive that this event did the prototyping, but what is scary about it is sustainability,” Humeid said. What is needed, he believes, is for programming to keep running throughout the year and for design to become important at the national level, supported by state institutions. At the event itself, visitors agreed. “It would be great to see cultural events like this happening all year-round,” Shaheen said.

Beiruti, meanwhile, knows that it will take work to make the Raghadan terminal a permanent fixture in Amman’s cultural life. But she hopes Design Week will set a precedent that can’t be ignored. “If you demonstrate the potential, even if it goes away afterward, you feel a void,” she said.

Read more on Al Monitor

September 3rd : Skyscraper Day

September 3rd : Skyscraper Day was chosen as a day to celebrate building of tall habitable structures.  It is the birthday of architect Louis H. Sullivan, who called the “father of skyscrapers” as he is considered to have designed the first ones in his home town of Chicago.  Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, better known as SOM of the US is one of the world leading architecture and engineering firms.  www.som.com has produced the design of residential tower that is object of the article below.

Commemoration of September 11, 2001, where nearly 3,000 people were killed in the terrorist attacks at the World Trade Center (WTC) twin Towers in New York took place yesterday. 

First and foremost, an overwhelming majority of structural engineers agree that the tragedies of September 11 were the result of a terrorist attack that caused catastrophic damage to WTC 1 and 2 as explained by William Kotterman, Licensed Engineer (SE, PE) in San Francisco in his writing dated 10 September 2013.  The construction industry is traditionally known for its slow adoption of new technology and innovation.  But at SOM as evidenced by the following story, innovative thinking is obviously being encouraged so as to create that well known competitive advantage. [ms-protect-content]

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September 3^rd as Skyscraper Day . . .

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An architect’s work brings a special reward: the opportunity to eventually see designs built in the real world. For designers of supertall towers, the privilege is especially grand — their work can define city skylines. Yet, for a variety of reasons, sometimes even the most compelling concepts do not end up getting constructed. In anticipation of Skyscraper Day on September 3^rd, we celebrate three inventive unbuilt towers, each of which seeks to elevate supertall design to even greater heights.

SOM’s design for Al Sharq Tower, created in 2008, pushes the limits of engineering to maximize the potential of a tiny plot of land — albeit one with a prestigious address. The tower was intended to rise on 36 square meters fronting Sheikh Zayed Road, Dubai’s main boulevard, which is lined with luxury skyscrapers.

At 360 meters tall, Al Sharq Tower would have an aspect ratio of 10:1 — ten times as tall as it is wide. “It’s impossibly thin — you wouldn’t do this unless you had to,” said Gary Haney, a design partner at SOM.

Al Sharq Tower Facade Detail

While a number of super-thin towers have sprouted up in recent years — notably in New York, where market forces and zoning laws have combined to produce improbably slender designs — Al Sharq remains different from any other high-rise yet built. Its unprecedented engineering concept is visible in its facade, formed by structural post-tensioned cables, which connect to the tower’s concrete core. The system works “sort of like a vertical suspension bridge,” Haney said. The result is a skyscraper free of interior columns, providing an open floor plan for the apartments inside, and uninterrupted vistas high above the desert.

Read the rest of the article at

https://medium.com/@SOM/tall-tales-three-unbuilt-skyscrapers-5b0053fdecb#.fc9y0wms8

Al Sharq Tower Typical Floor Plan

Other reading of interest could be found in Skyscraper Day 2015: 10 Facts, Photos Celebrating Ridiculously Tall Buildings Around The World written by Elizabeth Whitman http://www.ibtimes.com/skyscraper-day-2015-10-facts-photos-celebrating-ridiculously-tall-buildings-around-2080286

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Buildings Facades Design and Construction

An article that was reproduced in July, in almost all regional and local media of the GCC, covers the new trend of buildings facades design and construction.  It is being perceived to increasingly take greater importance under the combined influencing factors of cheaper oil prices and climate change concerns. 

The pressure that is exercised on the GCC countries construction industry is to focus on new low-energy building materials and assembly technologies over the next eight years, as billions of dollars are invested into infrastructure development across the region.

According to a regional market study issued in Dubai, spending on building exteriors will increase from $8bn this year to $12bn in 2024.

Low-energy architecture to get a major fillip in region . . .

The pressure on the UAE and the rest of the GCC countries to focus on new low-energy architecture will increase over the next eight years as billions of dollars are ploughed into infrastructure development across the region, a new research shows.

According to a regional market study, spending on building exteriors will increase from $8bn in 2016 to $12bn in 2024.

Accounting for 41.8% of the overall facades market last year, Saudi Arabia alone is estimated to grow to $5.5bn by 2024, up from $3bn this year.

Architects and developers need to prioritise lower heating and air conditioning costs to achieve energy efficiency, says the report which was commissioned by dmg events Middle East, Asia and Africa, organisers of the Windows, Doors and Façades trade exhibition launching in Dubai in September.

The study says significant growth in the GCC façades market will stem from a big rise in the number of construction, refurbishment and renovation projects driven by tourism and major events like the 2019 World Athletics Championships in Doha, Expo 2020 Dubai and the 2022 FIFA World Cup.

Issued by US-based market research and consulting specialists Grand View Research, the study estimates increased spending on facades in the other Gulf countries between this year and 2024 as follows: UAE – $2bn to $3bn; Qatar – $1bn to $2bn; Kuwait – $603m to $825m; Oman – $434m to $535m; and Bahrain – $226m to $305m.

“The key factor expected to drive the façades industry is the need to lower heating and air conditioning cost and achieve greater energy-efficiency,” said Muhammed Kazi, exhibition director of Windows, Doors & Façades. “Façades give buildings a superior look which is a big priority for corporate headquarters. But these impressive glass fronted buildings consume the highest energy and regulating their temperature is a big task.

“With massive development scheduled in the region, despite the decline in oil prices, there is now a big opportunity for architects and other design professionals in the GCC countries. This is especially the case in the UAE which is the region’s largest user of energy on a per capita basis, with 70 per cent of primary energy usage through buildings, mainly due to air-conditioning and lighting.”

The Windows, Doors & Façades exhibition will showcase a wide range of products for optimising energy retention and management, which vary from embedding the use of plants into the design of buildings, using minimal sliding doors, automated layered glazed panels as well as digital, interactive façades, already popular in major cities around the world.

Touching story about an all-girl school

The Dash of Zaha Hadid

This week on one of the national news TV stations, I saw a touching story about an all-girl school in Jordan which was already overcrowded.  When all the Syrian refugee girls started showing up, the principal of the school declared that the refugee girls could attend only if they brought their own chairs.  Of which they did.   It did not take long for the girls to feel welcomed and have a sense of belonging.  The atmosphere was prime for learning and making friends.  The following is a touching story about an all-girl school where Zaha Hadid started her life.

Desperately wanting to go to school is not the normal plea of most British, American and Canadian children.  But in the Middle East where oppression is the norm, I can imagine that girls must hunger and thirst for a sense of significance.  I venture to say, their sense of significance is derived by either being supported by their father or marrying well.  Given the chance, they cherish any opportunity for an education…it’s their ticket to a dream-life of independence.

Zaha Hadid was born to a wealthy Muslim family on 31 October 1950 in Baghdad, Iraq. . . [ms-protect-content]   Her father, Muhammad al-Hajj Husayn Hadid, was a wealthy industrialist from Mosul, Iraq. Her mother, Wajiha al-Sabunji, was an artist from Mosul.  I have no knowledge if she had any siblings;  I assume not, as it appears that her parents showered her with devoted attention, culturally inspiring travels and privileged boarding schools in England and Switzerland.

Zaha died of a heart attack on 31 March 2016 in a Miami, Florida hospital while being treated for bronchitis.   I find it odd that she was born and died on the same day, the 31^st.  Her entire 65 years on earth is shrunk into the dash between 31 October 1950 – 31 March 2016.  In short, she bought her education ticket to her dream-life of independence.  The story of Cinderella was not her aspiration.   Instead she became a famous, world renowned architect…and designer extraordinaire.

Her entire, extensive list of accolades, awards and life-time achievements are impressive.  Most notably she was the first woman and the first Muslim to receive the Pritzker Architecture Prize, winning it in 2004. She received the Stirling Prize in 2010 and 2011. In 2012, she was created a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire and in 2015 she became the first woman to be awarded the RIBA Gold Medal.  See Wikipedia for a partial list of her life-time projects and awards. No doubt she had more on the drafting board in her London office of 400 employees.  As these projects come to completion, her list will continue to grow post posthumously.

PHOTO BY DAVE M. BENETT/GETTY IMAGES   Zaha Hadid at The London Television Centre on 16 April 2013.

Over the last, at least, 3 decades on hearing about Zaha’s work, my observation throughout her life is:

1. Her insatiable appetite for learning and pushing the envelope of knowledge;
2. Her unconventional bold, brazen, Joan of Arc style persona;
3. Her persona manifested into like type unconventional and bold architecture;
4. Her Renaissance approach to design, beyond architecture to fashion, furniture, interiors, landscaping.

First throughout her life, Zaha was well educated and thrived in the arena of learning.  She attended the American University of Beirut.  Thereafter in 1972, she continued her educational pursuits in London to study at the Architectural Association School of Architecture.  She then moved to Rotterdam, Netherlands to work for her former professor’s practice, at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture becoming a partner in 1977.  Even after she started her own London-based architecture firm in 1980, she continued her quest for knowledge by teaching at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where she held the Kenzo Tange Professorship, and at the Architectural Association.

In the 1990s, she held the Sullivan Chair professorship at the University of Illinois at Chicago‘s School of Architecture.  At various times, she served as guest professor at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg (HFBK Hamburg), the Knowlton School of Architecture at Ohio State University, the Masters Studio at Columbia University, and was the Eero Saarinen Visiting Professor of Architectural Design at the Yale School of Architecture. From 2000, Hadid was a guest professor at the Institute of Architecture at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, in the Zaha Hadid Master Class Vertical-Studio. [1]

With the complexity of the various undertakings albeit architecture, furniture, interiors, and fashion projects from the four corners of the globe, she exemplified the quintessential student.   Plenty of research had to go into each in order to understand not only the function of form, but the geographical envelope, the historical significance, and the innovation of style which she and her staff brought to each endeavor.

Second, her personality was often cited as being bold, brazen, strong, curt, narcissistic and arrogant. So what’s the problem with that?  Sounds like perfectly normal characteristics for an architect, especially a female architect trying to compete in a man’s world.  Joan of arc was no ordinary warrior either.  Like Joan of arc, Dame Zaha Hadid was a woman on a crusade and widely departed from the Cinderella stereo type.   Sarcasm, bullying, and ostracism did not deter her.  She broke through the glass ceiling to rise to the pinnacle of the architecture world.  Don’t ever underestimate the power of a woman with a dream.  Perhaps the contrast between her origin from a repressed society in Iraq compared to the Western world’s liberties and opportunities was her driving force.

At the London Aquatic Center for the 2012 Olympics

Third, like her personality, Zaha’s design style “liberated architectural geometry with the creation of highly expressive, sweeping fluid forms of multiple perspective points and fragmented geometry that evoke the chaos and flux of modern life.  A pioneer of parametricism, and an icon of neo-futurism.” [2] The London Aquatic Center for the 2012 Olympics is one of her more acclaimed designs.

Al Wakrah, Qatar Stadium

Her first project for the Arab region was for her former school in Beirut.  Of all the world-wide architectural and product design projects which she was commissioned, there was only one which she did for her country of birth.  Another notable upcoming project is a stadium for the Doha, Qatar 2022 FIFA World Cup; the Al Wakrah project commenced in 2015.

The full list of her major accomplishments is beyond the scope of this article.  Suffice to say, Zaha had a productive and successful career.  She revolutionized the world of architecture.

Fourth, she was truly a Renaissance woman.  She applied her design knowledge to various mediums and disciplines of architecture, landscaping, interiors, furniture, and fashion design.  She was known to have created her own outfits in school by stapling pieces of cloths together.  It did not need to exist.  She would build the world around her where she roamed.  The world was her oyster and all seemed possible to achieve.

In summary, she was a refugee, of sorts, on a personal quest to seek a dream life of her own making.  As I ponder the life and death of Zaha Hadid, I cannot help but think about all the little Syrian refugee girls who gladly brought their own chairs to school for only the opportunity to learn something.   I bet there’s a few young Zaha wannabes there and out of school.  Our world was forever changed by Zaha’s vision and strength.  Rest in Peace dear sister.

Footnote:

1. Wikipedia, profile of Zaha Hadid
2. Ditto

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Tokyo Sky Mile Tower to double Burj Khalifa

PHOTOGRAPHY BY KOHN PEDERSEN FOX ASSOCIATES

If the plans are accepted – ‘Sky Mile Tower’ would be surrounded by a series of man-made hexagonal islands, that are designed to protect Tokyo from flooding and act as foundation for homes for around half a million people.

The tower and satellite islands also come equipped with wind, solar and algae farms to provide electricity and its façades have been designed to collect, filter and store water from the elements of the surrounding weather.

All vertical population movement will be make use of Thyssen Krupp’s cable-free, magnetic levitation elevators, which can run vertically and horizontally.

Assuming it is approved, the man-made marvel is set to be completed by 2045.

This Is What Tokyo Will Look Like in 2045—Including Its Mile-High Skyscraper . . . [ms-protect-content]

UK Housing design trends for 2016

adf architectdatafile published on 17 December 2015 this article for the purpose and use of the citizens of the UK.  We found that with respect to all housing types, great or small, it could be of some interest for all citizens of the MENA. 

As defined by Wikipedia, the Royal Institute of British Architects is a professional body for architects primarily in the United Kingdom, but also internationally, founded for the advancement of architecture.  Members of the RIBA practice all over the world as individual and / or as employees of practices and corporations.  Their involvement covers all stages and specialities of the design of building and infrastructure development.

UK – France table of equivalent stages

RIBA heralds housing design trends for 2016