The King Abdullah Financial District (KAFD) Metro Station-Riyadh

THIN SHELL STRUCTURESPRESENTATION BY ISE MASTER STUDENTS

-2014-

ADVISORS:

The landscape and climate of the UAE pavilion are integral to Emirati culture. Like a sand dune, the pavilion appears rough and textured on the side that bears the full force of the wind and smooth on the other side. The northern elevation is more porous to admit natural light, while the southern elevation has a solid façade, to minimize solar gain. A stainless steel skin, treated to appear golden, encloses the jewel-like shell.

The complex structure is a triangulated lattice of flat stainless steel panels, joined by adjustable nodes, which are designed to enable the pavilion to be demounted on site and constructed quickly and economically. The peak rises to 20 meter in height and it is entered via a glazed lip at the pavilion’s base. Light penetrates the building’s business center and VIP area through glazed vertical strips, which illuminate the pavilion from within by night.

Abu Dhabi-Business center.

Thin-shell structures are light weight constructions using shell elements. These elements are typically curved and are assembled to large structures. Typical applications are fuselages of aeroplanes, boat hulls and roof structures in some buildings.

The central quadrangle of the British Museum in London was redeveloped to a design by Foster and parteners, from a 1970s design by Colin St. John Wilson,  to become the Queen Elizabeth II Great Court, commonly referred to simply as the Great Court, during the late 1990s. It was opened by Queen Elizabeth in 2000. The glass and steel roof is made up of 4,878 unique steel members connected at 1,566 unique nodes and 1,656 pairs of glass windowpanes making up 6,100m2 of glazing;  each of a unique shape because of the undulating nature of the roof.

The Lotus Temple, located in New Delhi, India, is a Bahá'í House of Worship completed in 1986. Notable for its flowerlike shape, it serves as the Mother Temple of the Indian subcontinent and has become a prominent attraction in the city.

Inspired by the lotus flower, the design for the House of Worship in New Delhi is composed of 27 free-standing marble clad "petals" arranged in clusters of three to form nine sides. The nine doors of the Lotus Temple open onto a central hall slightly more than 40 meters tall that is capable of holding up to 2,500 people. The surface of the House of Worship is made of white marble from Penteli mountain in Greece, the very same from which many ancient monuments and other Bahá'í Houses of Worship are built. Along with its nine surrounding ponds and the gardens, the Lotus Temple property comprises 26 acres (105,000 m²; 10.5 ha). It took two years only to make a computer model of the great temple. The Lotus Temple is unique due to the fact that it does not contain a single straight line.

The Sydney Opera House is a multi-venue performing arts centre in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.

The facility features a modern expressionist design, with a series of large precast concrete "shells", each composed of sections of a sphere of 75.2 metres (246 ft 8.6 in) radius forming the roofs of the structure, set on a monumental podium. The building covers 1.8 hectares (4.4 acres) of land and is 183 m (600 ft) long and 120 m (394 ft) wide at its widest point. It is supported on 588 concrete piers sunk as much as 25 m (82 ft) below sea level. Apart from the tile of the shells and the glass curtain walls of the foyer spaces, the building's exterior is largely clad with aggregate panels composed of pink granite.

The Los Manantiales restaurant is located in Xochimilco (Mexico) and has been builded in 1958. Felix Candela used thin-shell concrete membranes in order to achieve both economy in cost and materials. His shells are thin spans which are both stable as supporting structures and simple, symmetrical shapes. The geometry of Los Manantiales is made up of a series of four cast-in-place, concrete hyperbolic paraboloids (hypars) connected at their groins (the valleys where the hypars intersect) to form a lotus-like shape.

These hypars are thus dived into eight saddles, joining at the centre to form a large undivided space bounded by an array of large glazed surfaces under an octagonal groined vault. Thus, the hypars together make up both ceiling and wall, spanning 42.4 metres across the entirety of the restaurant interior and exterior with a material thickness of just four centimetres. The entire concrete membrane was poured in the wooden formwork at the same time so that the hypars could support one another immediately upon drying.

The Oceanographic Park (L'Oceanogràfic) in Valencia is an oceanarium, where different marine habitats are represented.

The Oceanographic Park has been designed in two levels. The lower level is underground and houses most of the aquariums and service areas. The upper level is mostly for outdoor leisure use. The floor area is 100,000 m2. It makes the most out of the technical possibilities of acrylic materials, and numerous large pieces of acrylic have been used (The Oval Hall, 24 meters long, is catalogued as the world's biggest acrylic panel, and there are two underwater tunnels, one 30 meters long and the other, 70 meters long). For the Park they used three materials: concrete, steel and Plexiglass. Overall, 110,000 m2 of reinforced concrete surface areas of the structure, with contact to the sea water and 8,500 m of construction joints.

Munich Olympic Stadium, designed by the German architect Günther Behnisch and the engineer Frei Otto, the Olympiastadion was considered revolutionary for its time. This included large sweeping canopies of acrylic glass stabilized by steel cables that were used for the first time on a large scale. The idea was to imitate the Alps and to set a counterpart to the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin.

The continuous tensile surface that bridges all of the main buildings of the Olympic Games is subject to a hierarchical structural system that creates a series of volumes across the site.  The canopies membrane is suspended from a multitude of vertical masts that allow for the dramatic draping curves of the surface to flow dynamically across the site changing form, scale, and sectional characteristics.  The large canopies are stabilized laterally through a network of smaller cables that attach to a larger steel cable extending over the entire span into concrete footings at either end.

The TWA Flight Center, which opened in 1962, is a standalone terminal at New York City's John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK) for Trans World Airlines. Eero Saarinen and his Detroit-based firm were commissioned in 1955 to design the TWA Flight Center.

Saarinen was inspired by the Gothic vaults to house an area without columns that allows for various services. Although the structure appears to be a sculptural piece of concrete is reinforced inside by an invisible network of steel, a kind of "invisible steel hammock" that supports the roof. This is a Y-shaped column that becomes so plastic and other beams leisurely hold responsible for the four sections of the roof, while allowing, through its separation, the zenith passage of natural light and lighten the visual weight of the structure. With a width of 67m, a length of 96m and a height of 15m it is a National Historic Landmark, its facilities being filmed by Steven Spielberg in "Catch Me If You Can".

Imperial War Museum Duxford is a branch of the Imperial War Museum near Duxford in Cambridgeshire, England. Britain's largest aviation museum, Duxford houses the museum's large exhibits, including nearly 200 aircraft, military vehicles, artillery and minor naval vessels in seven main exhibition buildings including the American Air Museum.

The building is shaped as a section of a torus, formed from a curved concrete roof 90 m wide, 18.5 m high and 100 m deep. The dimensions of the building were dictated by the need to accommodate the museum's B-52 Stratofortress bomber with its 61 m wingspan and a tail 16 m high. The roof was constructed as a double-layered concrete shell, built in 924 precast reinforced concrete sections. Inverted T-shaped sections provided the inner layer with further flat panels forming the outer layer.The roof weighs 6000 tonnes and is able to support suspended aircraft weighing up to 10 tonnes. From a visitor's perspective, the pedestrian entrance leads to a mezzanine floor level with the cockpit of the museum's B-52, while the lack of supporting columns allows aircraft to hang from the ceiling. Heavier aircraft stand on the floor of the building, which covers 6,500 m2. Construction began with the building of abutments in October 1995 and the roof was completed in September 1996. The building won the 1998 Stirling Prize for Foster and Partners. The Royal Institute of British Architects Stirling Prize is a British prize for excellence in architecture.

Atlántida Church The project of the Church of Christ Obrero, near Atlanta, one of the seaside resorts of the coast of Uruguay, was entrusted to the engineer Eladio Dieste in 1952.

The walls and surfaces are covered with thin and folded brick laminate, designed by Dieste, are so slim that never before had anyone been able to achieve the effect with traditional materials. The unique works of Dieste can only be understood from the technical leaps made in the masonry. The "union" has been among the essential parts of any structure to ensure its stability, giving the successive pieces relationship, avoiding at all times to make vertical stripes a continuity. The "equipment" was established as a reliable way to safely and consistently to achieve the "union" among its parts, generating a constructive pattern characteristic of each type of gear and place The thoroughly traditional placement of the bricks joined to each other, keeping a predetermined joint in the masonry, disappears completely in the architecture of Dieste; it adds to it a new component, "steel" in bars or wires, which is included in a regular and uniform manner throughout the plan. To do this, Dieste has in all his works, when it suits, arranged the pieces without joints, which generates a bidirectional graticule between the pieces, where are located the wires or bars of steel. This allows him to create what Dieste calls "structural ceramics," where the proportion varies depending on ductility to generate the force or local pressure that is required for tension or compression in the masonry.

The J.S. Dorton Arena (known to its architect as the Paraboleum) is a 7,610-seat multi-purpose arena in Raleigh, North Carolina, on the grounds of the North Carolina State Fair. It was opened in 1952.Architect Maciej Nowicki was killed in an airplane crash before the construction phase, and local architect William Henley Dietrick supervised the completion of the arena using Nowicki's innovative design. Its design features a steel cable supported saddle-shaped roof in tension, held up by parabolic concrete arches in compression. The arches cross about 20 feet above ground level and continue underground, where the ends of the arches are held together by more steel cables in tension. The outer walls of the arena support next to no weight at all. Incorporating an unusual elliptical design by Matthew Nowicki, of the North Carolina State University Department of Architecture, the arena was listed in the National Register of Historic Places on April 11, 1973.[1]Originally named the "State Fair Arena", it was dedicated to Dr. J. S. Dorton, former North Carolina State Fair manager, in 1961.It is currently the home of the Carolina Rollergirls (WFTDA). In the past, it has served as the home of numerous sports teams. The longest serving tenant was the Raleigh IceCaps (ECHL) ice hockey team from 1991–1998. The American Basketball Association'sCarolina Cougars also played some games there from 1969–74.

Bordeaux law courts Structure is a database for works of structural and civil engineering, but also contains many other works of importance or interest of the fields of architecture and public works. This site is mostly concerned with the structural aspects of the works documented here and the technical aspects of their construction and design.

At the same time we do take into account the social, historic and architectural context. The structures are chosen based on the interest they pose for the profession of the structural or civil engineer, but since that profession did not exist before the 18th century, many historic structures included here are firstly known for their architectural merits.

The "Opernhaus" Dortmund is the opera house of Dortmund, Germany, which opened in 1966 and is formally operated by the Theater Dortmund organisation. This is the second opera house to exist in Dortmund, the first one having been built in 1904, but it was destroyed during World War I.

The 1966 opera house was designed by architects Heinrich Rosskotten and Edgar Tritthart. The design separates the functions of the stage and technical areas in the Bühnenhaus (stage house), which is dominated by straight lines, from the auditorium under a thin-shell structure roof. It was called the drunken clam because the roof looks like a clam.

Kresge Auditorium is an auditorium building for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  It was designed by the noted architect Eero Saarinen, with ground-breaking in 1953 and dedication in 1955.

The auditorium is defined by an elegant thin-shell structure of reinforced concrete, one-eighth of a sphere rising to a height of 50 feet, and sliced away by sheer glass curtain walls so that it comes to earth on only three points. Thin-shelled concrete technology was innovative for the times. The dome weighs only 1200 tons and is currently clad with copper.Every seat in the concert hall has an unobstructed view, since there are no interior supports for the overarching dome. Working with renowned acoustical architects Bolt, Beranek and Newman, architect Saarinen employed free-hanging acoustic "clouds" that absorb and direct sound, instead of a traditional plaster ceiling. These clouds also contain lights, loudspeakers, and ventilation.

The form of the roof was determined precisely, using 3,700 check points on a grid. It was constructed by continually cross checking the position of all points, one by one, with laser level finders, to ensure a consistent depth of 200mm for the concrete, with a tolerance of only 10mm. The roof was completed in five separate pours, using a quick-setting mixture to eliminate the possibility of the concrete sliding off the curving sections. Once hardened, all joint marks were removed with grinding machines and the entire surface trowelled with mortar to create a single surface. A flexible water proofing urethane layer was added later to compensate for any slight movement in the concrete surface. The result is an architecture of remarkable lightness, of uplifting fluidity. It is timeless and contemplative all at the same time. But the starring role belongs to the roof, all 2,270 square metres of it, which fl oats overhead in peaks and troughs, as a single sheet of billowing almost impossibly thin reinforced white concrete. The roof’s form is a fine balance of functional, servicing, structural and aesthetic requirements.

Meiso no Mori Crematorium, Japan("forest of meditation.“)

Designed by Toyo Ito in collaboration with structural engineer Mutsuro Sasaki

Lambert–St. Louis International Airport

Lambert–St. Louis International Airport is an international airport serving Greater St. Louis, Missouri. It is about 10 miles (16 km) northwest of downtown St. Louis in unincorporated St. Louis County between Berkeleyand Bridgeton. It is the largest and busiest airport in the state with 255 daily departures to about 90 domestic and international locations. In 2011, nearly 13 million passengers traveled through the airport.[3] The airport serves as a focus city for Southwest Airlines and was a former hub for Trans World Airlines and former focus-city for American Airlines and AmericanConnection

Named for Albert Bond Lambert, an Olympic medalist and prominent St. Louis aviator, the airport rose to international prominence in the 20th century, thanks to its association with Charles Lindbergh, its groundbreaking air traffic control, its status as the hub of Trans World Airlines, and its iconic terminal. Designed by Minoru Yamasaki, the building inspired terminals at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City and Paris-Charles de Gaulle Airport in France.

Dos Hermanas Velodrome-Sevilla Spain

The Town Hall of Dos Hermanas (Seville), owner or the existing open sport facility used just for the practise of cycling, considered the possibillity of being giving other uses which meant constructing a roof over the velodrome.

It was suggested that the oval shaped building with mayor axes of 145m and 114m should be covered in an attractive and competitive way without affecting the existing construction. Due to the lack of perimetral space which made it impossible for the structure to be extended and be supported by large supports and anchorages, the authors' proposal was focused on a design that was completed independent of the existing building, being supported in a stand-alone way on four different perimetral supports located one at each vertex of a of a 91m side square.

David S. Ingalls RinkDavid S. Ingalls Rink is a hockey rink in New Haven designed by architect Eero Saarinen and built between 1953 and 1958 for Yale University. It is commonly referred to as The Whale, due to its appearance. The building was constructed for $1.5 million, which was double its original cost estimate. It seats 3,500 people and has a maximum ceiling height of 23 meters. The rink employs an innovative structural system in which a 90 meter reinforced concrete arch, from which a cable net is hung, supports a timber roof. This causes a stable, double curvature form.

Balz House

The Sports Hall and Athletics Stadium- Saudi Arabia

The10,000-seat indoor arena is the largest of its type in the country and is designed to be used at all levels up to international competition, as well as for training. It is flexible and can be reconfigured for a wide range of sports, and can also be used for cultural events and exhibitions.The shaded 21,000-seat stand for watching outdoor athletics is attached to the indoor arena, becoming an extension of its tented form, and so able to share facilities. The wrapped facades and roof provide another deliberate evocation of the tradition of tents in Arabic culture. Whereas it was possible to use largely natural ventilation in the stadium, the rigours of the climate require the sports hall to be air-conditioned.

Norwich Sports Village Hotel

Structure: thin shell

Designer: Heinz Isler

Function/usage: swimming pool/aquatic center, hotel, gymnasium

Built: 1987-1991Status: in useSpan: 48 mMaterials: reinforced concrete

An anomaly of the engineering world, he directed his efforts away from the mathematics of engineering and focused on the physical model. This study into physical modeling put emphasis on form and stability. The goal to create structures of high efficiency with the lowest possible environmental impact led Isler to explore 3 types of formwork: molded earth, inflated rubber membranes, and draped fabrics.

Niederaussem Power Station is a lignite-fired power station in the Bergheim Niederaussem/Rhein Erft circle, owned by RWE. It consists of nine units, which were built between 1963 and 2003.

The tallest cooling tower has been built between 1999 and 2001, it’s a natural draft cooling tower, with total height of 200 m and its base diameter measures 152.54 m. Obviously the shell structure is composed of two hyperbolic shells of revolution and has in its most regions a wall thickness of 0.24 m. Today natural draught cooling towers definitely belong to the largest and thinnest industrial buildings at time.

Contractor: Heitkamp GmbH

Niederaussem Power Station

Tower InfinityCheongna City Tower, Tower Infinity or Ecoprism Tower is a proposed tower near the Incheon Airport just outside of Seoul, South Korea. The tower is dubbed as the World's first invisible tower. The invisibility illusion will be achieved with a high-tech LED facade system. The tower is built primarily for leisure acitivies. The building will be spread over an area of 145,500 square metres (1,566,000 sq ft). The Design by GDS got first prize in a National Design Competition sponsored by Korea Land and Housing Corporation

Although height is not the selling point of the tower, the tower at 450 metres (1,480 ft) will be the sixth largest tower in the world and will sport the third highest observatory in the world.

Tokyo Dome

Tokyo Dome ( 東 京 ド ー ム Tōkyō Dōmu, TYO: 9681) is a 55,000-seat (actual capacity of 42,000) baseball stadium located in Bunkyo Ward of Tokyo, Japan. Construction on the stadium began on May 16, 1985, and it opened for business on March 17, 1988. It was built on the site of the Velodrome, which was next door to the site of the predecessor ballpark, Kōrakuen Stadium. Like Kōrakuen, the Dome hosts the Toei Superheroes live shows of the year.

Tokyo Dome's original nickname was "The Big Egg", with some calling it the "Tokyo Big Egg". Its dome-shaped roof is an air-supported structure, a flexible membrane held up by slightly pressurizing the inside of the stadium.

It is the home field of the Yomiuri Giants baseball team, and has also hosted basketball, American football and association football games, as well as puroresu (pro-wrestling) matches, mixed martial arts events, kickboxing events, monster truck races, and music concerts. It is also the location of the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame which chronicles the history of baseball in Japan.

Montreal Biosphère

The Biosphère is a museum in Montreal dedicated to the environment. It is located at Parc Jean-Drapeau, on Île Sainte-Hélène in the former pavilion of the United States for the 1967 World Fair

In August, 1990, Environment Canada purchased the site for $17.5 million to turn it into an interactive museum showcasing and exploring the water ecosystems of the Great Lakes-Saint Lawrence River regions.[4] The museum was inaugurated in 1995 as a water museum, and is a set of enclosed buildings designed by Éric Gauthier, inside the original steel skeleton. The Biosphère changed its name in 2007 to become an environment museum. It offers interactive activities and presents exhibitions about the major environmental issues related to water, climate change, air, ecotechnologies and sustainable development