All About Construction

What are Supertall and Megatall Buildings? “Supertall” is defined as a building over 300 meters (984 feet) in height, and a “Megatall” as a building over 600 meters (1,968 feet) in height. Although great heights are now being achieved with built tall buildings—in excess of 800 meters (2,600 feet)—as of July 2013 there are only 73 supertall and 2 megatall building completed and occupied globally. Thus the completion of a supertall building is still a significant milestone.

Within this decade we will likely witness not only the world’s first kilometer-tall building, but also the completion of a significant number of buildings over 600 meters (around 2,000 feet) – that’s twice the height of the Eiffel Tower. Two years ago, prior to the completion of the Burj Khalifa, this building type did not exist. And yet, by 2020, we can expect at least eight such buildings to exist internationally. The term “supertall” (which refers to a building over 300 meters) is thus no longer adequate to describe these buildings: we are entering the era of the “megatall.” This term is now officially being used by the Council to describe buildings over 600 meters in height, or double the height of a supertall (see Figure 1). Figure 1. Diagram of the predicted World's 20 Tallest in the year 2020 as of Dec 2011 As we started the 21st century, just 11 short years ago, the Petronas Towers held the title of “The World’s Tallest” at 452 meters (1,483 feet) in height. T...

Vanity Height: the Use-less Space in Today’s Tallest Buildings It is noticed at Jeddah Kingdom tower, that a fair amount of the top of the building seemed to be an unoccupied spire. This prompted us to investigate the increasing trend towards extreme spires and other extensions of tall buildings that do not enclose usable space, and create a new term to describe this – Vanity Height, i.e., the distance between a skyscraper’s highest occupiable floor and its architectural top, as determined by Height Criteria. Greatest Supertall Vanity Ratio With a vanity height of nearly 124 meters within its architectural height of 321 meters, the Burj Al Arab has the highest non-occupiable-to-occupiable height ratio among completed supertalls.  39% of its height is non-occupiable. Figure 2. World’s Ten Tallest Vanity Heights The ten tallest “Vanity Heights” in today’s completed supertalls as of July 2013 data. * The highest occupied floor height as datum line. ** The...

This tall building height calculator is developed to assist in determining tall building heights when only the story count is known. The calculator is divided into three categories representing the three major functions represented in tall buildings;              (i) Office              (ii) Residential/Hotel              (iii) Mixed-use or when the function unknown The calculator will provide an approximate height for a single tall building, but as tall building characteristics vary significantly with location, structural material, form, profile, etc, in some instances estimates will vary considerably with actual building height. As such, the calculator is best utilized to determine heights in multiple building / statistical studies, where there are many unknown building heights. In these instances the ...

Optimizing Your Construction Business for Profitable Growth Construction companies are meeting the challenge of ever-intensifying competition by refining their business operations with standardized operating practices and “visible” information that is shared among multiple departments. “Before, only owners who wanted to grow a very large company would worry about transitioning from the informal business they started to formalized, standardized business processes,” says CEO of a leading provider of construction management software solutions, expert services, and best practices. “But in the current environment, you also have to make that transition just to stay competitive and improve your profitability.” Ultimately, if you can attain purpose-driven buy-in and drive repeatable processes  towards widespread fluency, your 10% overhead becomes 7%, and 5% profit  becomes 8%. You start maximizing profit and shrinking overhead. Standardization + Visibility = Higher Quality...

A teardown on a small hill 50 miles north of the city in Waccabuc, New York, hit the mark. When architect saw the view into the woods from the roof of the existing house, he decided that living spaces should be at that level, where abundant trees would provide privacy. The couple razed the old structure but saved the foundation for the new 2,170-square-foot house. The second floor, a rectangular volume, cantilevers dramatically 20 feet from each end of the house. These cantilevers, supported by two steel trusses integrated within a two-by-six wood frame, extend from a pedestal-like base to shelter a carport at the east and a porch at the west. “I was keen on developing something whose characteristics were determined by a structure,” says Architect. Enclosed by cedar walls that are stained black, with shiplap joints, the second floor contains the kitchen, living spaces, and a bedroom. Two more bedrooms are located on the ground floor, the front of whic...

On the first day on the project, we decided to fly it off a cliff,” says Brian MacKay-Lyons, describing the simple wood and steel–frame residence his firm designed. The two-story, 970-square-foot house juts out from its perch on a bluff overlooking Nova Scotia's windswept Atlantic coast. “We thought, 'we can be boring and build on land, or we can do it this way.' ” And so the Cliff House was born T he owners, a young family that shuttles between a primary residence in California and their native Nova Scotia, didn't want their summer house to upstage its dramatic site. To that end, Halifax-based MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects (MLS) hewed to their practice's principles, choosing simple materials: an envelope of cedar acts as a kind of “wood lampshade,” wrapping a steel frame, explains MacKay-Lyons. The area's ubiquitous fishing shacks served as inspiration for the Cliff House, and the architect expects the house's cladding, like that of the...

Program:  The client, a businessman with a young family, wanted to experiment with unusual construction methods for his new house on a steep hill overlooking the sea and mountains outside Barcelona. He had three requests—large windows to take advantage of views, privacy from the neighbors, and the use of a new concrete technology that, if successful, could be marketed and used in future projects Solution:  The architects designed an X-shaped, two-story house on a relatively flat step in the hillside and sprayed high-density concrete at high pressure to single-sided formwork, a technique usually used for tunnels and bridges, not residential work. Glazed portions of the structure were angled to allow privacy from the neighbors and to take advantage of views of the landscape. The family parks its cars and enters the house at the upper level—with a master suite and studio—and descends to the lower level for a double-height living area, three bedrooms, and a combined kitch...

Houses embedded in the earth are becoming a fashion. The reasons are compelling–the grass roofs reduce energy loads and their low profile doesn't impinge on the natural landscape. In the case of a 2,850-square-foot guesthouse in the Colorado Rocky Mountains, the clients, for whom Gluck had designed a main house on the site in 2004, wanted a separate structure to be located on property to the south between a creek and an access road. But they didn't want it to interfere with the splendid mountain vista they had from the main house. “So many views are destroyed by plunking buildings on top of the land,” The architects configured the guesthouse as two rectilinear steel-framed bars that intersect; the primary one contains open living and dining spaces, with a roof gradually rising to the south at a 20-degree angle. The volume seems to collide with and lift over a rectilinear structure running east–west on a diagonal, which contains three bedrooms and the garage. A wall...