Word: steels
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...decade or so has been a time of virtuoso architects, not just Libeskind, Hadid and Isozaki but also Frank Gehry, Santiago Calatrava, Norman Foster, Renzo Piano and many others, all of them working in very different styles but with the common impulse to knock apart the familiar glass-and-steel box and put it back together in unheard of ways...
...Calatrava's Olympic Stadium in Athens, seen by billions on television during last summer's Games, is a voluptuous, low-slung bowl. But in recent years, even these architects have been moving into the vertical mode, taking their mambo wiggles and thunderbolts with them. The square-shouldered glass-and-steel boxes of Modernism are giving way to silhouettes that once seemed inconceivable but are coming soon to a skyline near...
...safety became much larger issues in the thinking of architects. More lives might have been saved at the Twin Towers if the plaster-wallboard interiors of the exit stairwells had not collapsed, blocking some exit routes. The Trade Center depended on a complicated structural system of interior and exterior steel columns. Many new towers favor superstrong concrete cores that not only brace more firmly against wind--and at 2,000-plus feet, you don't want to sway much--but also enclose emergency stairwells in solid...
...plan is for a structure that separates a dozen condos into discrete four-story modules--town houses in the sky. Each apartment is a $30 million, 10,000-sq.ft. package that's separately cantilevered from an 835-ft. central core, then further supported by exposed trusses that attach to steel piers running the full height of the building. The effect is a dynamic oscillation of forms, with alternating voids and volumes, something utterly unlike the inert slab that is the typical tower...
...plumb." The second is that with computers, engineers and architects can also produce accurate three-dimensional designs, then a 3-D model, which is easier for subcontractors to follow accurately than the old two-dimensional blueprints or specs. "We give that to the fabricators, the steel erector, the exterior wall façade supplier," says Thornton. "The 3D model makes for less error in the construction phase...