Civil Engineering Association

CTBUH Collection of Featured Papers 2010

The Technical Papers Library contains many hundreds of papers published by architects, engineers and academics on a range of multi-disciplinary subjects. The papers cover every facet of tall building design, construction and occupation and are searchable by author, topic and category.

Featured Technical Papers

Greening Modernism: Westraven Tower
Jeroen Hendriks, posted December 2010

The Westraven Office Complex in Utrecht, the Netherlands, is a combination of a renovated existing building and a new extension for the use of several divisions of the Dutch Department of Public Works.


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Proposed Methodology to Determine Seismic Performance Factors for Steel Diagrid Framed Systems
William Baker, Charles Besjak, Mark Sarkisian, Peter Lee, Chung-Soo Doo, posted December 2010

This paper presents a proposed methodology for the reliable determination of seismic performance factors for steel diagrid framed seismic force-resisting systems.

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Performance Based Seismic Design of a 75 Story Buckling Restrained Slender Steel Plate Shear Wall Tower
Sam Lee, Dasui Wang, Yun Liao & Neville Mathias, posted November 2010

The Jinta Tower is a 75-story building located in Tianjin, China, with slender steel plate shear walls (SPSW) used as the primary lateral load resisting system. Construction detail, method and schedule constraints result in the steel plates being subject to gravity loads.

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Case Study: O-14 Folded Exoskeleton
Jesse Reiser, Nanako Umemoto & Jaime Ocampo, posted November 2010

O-14 is a 22-story commercial tower characterized by 1,326 openings, randomly located and varying in size, throughout the whole exterior shell. The tower contains over 27,900 square meters (300,000 square feet) of office space.

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Tall Buildings in the Global Recession: 2008, 2020 and beyond
Philip Oldfield, Antony Wood, posted October 2010

The year 2008 will long be remembered as the start of an economic crisis that has gripped the entire globe - a year that may also have brought to an abrupt end the worldwide construction boom that has seen ever-denser cities containing ever-taller buildings.

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International Applications of Elevators for Fire Service Access and Occupant Egress in Fires
Richard W. Bukowski, posted October 2010

For more than two decades, the elevator industry has told us that elevators may not be safe to use during a fire. The Safety Code for Elevators and Escalators as well as building codes have required signs to advise occupants to use the stairs and not elevators in case of fire.

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The High-rise as a Retirement Community
Bridget Lesniak, Robert Neper & Donald Hamlin, posted September 2010

As cities are becoming denser, the functions of high-rises are expanding. In addition, the central business district is no longer the exclusive region of the high-rise form.

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New Solar Initiatives in Supertall Buildings: The Spire at Ras Al Khaimah
Philip Castillo & Meiring Beyers, posted September 2010

The Spire at Ras Al Khaimah, located in the United Arab Emirates, through its unique approachto building form and landscape offers opportunities to examine new sustainable strategies.

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Partial Occupancies for Phased and Multi-Use Tall Buildings
Robert Lau, posted August 2010

What if parts of a building could be occupied before the entire building is completed? What if a large high-rise project could be constructed in phases, so that only the spaces that the current market can support will be constructed?


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The Tall Building, Reconsidered…
Simon Allford & Paul Monaghan, posted August 2010

This paper examines the surprising revival of tall buildings in the UK since the late 1990s, through the work of Allford Hall Monaghan Morris. Founded in 1989 by four young architects, AHMM’s approach to tall building design is unsullied by the perceived failure of earlier generations of tall buildings in the UK.

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Case Study: Shanghai Tower
Jun Xia, Dennis Poon & Douglas C. Mass, posted July 2010

As the third tower in the trio of supertall buildings at the heart of Shanghai’s new Lujiazui Finance and Trade Zone, Shanghai Tower embodies a new prototype for tall buildings.


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The Vertical Garden City: Towards a New Urban Topology
Chris Abel, posted July 2010

The author reviews recent innovations in high-rise architecture in search of relevant solutions but finds them still limited by conventional urban typologies. The work of the author's Vertical Architecture STudio © (VAST) is illustrated by selected projects for a prototypical Vertical Garden City produced by students at different universities in Australia and the USA.

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Jinao Tower
Mark Sarkisian, C. Keith Boswell, Neville Mathias & Eric Long, posted June 2010

The 56 story, 232 m tall Jinao Tower in Nanjing, China, is a next-generation tower which maximizes performance, efficiency, and occupant experience. Its faceted form is derived from the juxtaposition of an innovative double-skin façade and an external lateral braced steel frame that wraps the tower from crown to base and defines the dimensions.

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Historical evolution of the service core
Dario Trabucco, posted June 2010

The service core is the distinctive feature of a tall building: it provides the skyscraper with structural solidity, room for elevators, and other amenities, and constitutes the main network for utility services, power and data.


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The Remaking of Mumbai: A CTBUH-IIT collaborative architectural design studio
Antony Wood, posted May 2010

The five towers rise up from the urban plane, connected by a sinuous, landscaped bridge that starts at the ground and works its way up, around and between the towers, culminating in a giant urban park in the sky; a horizontal plane connecting the towers and binding.

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Case Study: The Standard Hotel
Todd Schliemann, Tara Leibenhaut-Tyre, Megan Miller, Mark Plechaty, Erik Madsen, & Craig Tracy, posted May 2010

The building is a destination, both visually and experientially, realizing the client’s conceptual goal to create a "living room for the neighborhood," a public place where hotel guests and pedestrians can co-mingle in a variety of spaces.

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Elevator Traffic Simulation Procedure
Henri Hakonen & Marja-Liisa Siikonen, posted April 2010

Passenger service level in an elevator system depends on the group control and cannot be calculated directly. With conventional control, waiting times and interval have a correlation in up-peak. In this article, different simulation procedures and consistency of the simulation results are studied.

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Structural Design of Reinforced Concrete Tall Buildings,
Ali Sherif S. Rizk, posted April 2010

During the last 12 years the Structural Engineering Department at Dar Al-Handasah has designed 45 mixed-use tall buildings in different Arab countries. The designed towers are primarily made of reinforced concrete.


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Alternative Evacuation Design Solutions for High-rise Buildings
Simon Lay, posted March, 2010

There have been many proposals for novel and innovative evacuation solutions for high-rise buildings.This paper investigates in detail the role to be played by elevators and stairs in novel evacuation solutions which can deliver safe, efficient evacuation using current technology and well-tested products.

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Five Energy Generations of Tall Buildings
Philip Oldfield, Dario Trabucco, Antony Wood, posted March, 2010

Whilst there have been numerous categorisations of high-rise buildings according to their function, architectural style, height or structural strategy, historically little work has been undertaken to classify them based on factors affecting their energy performance.

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Building Façade or Fire Safety Façade?
Daniel J. O’Connor, posted February, 2010

This paper discusses the code provisions and current test standards applicable to perimeter fire barrier systems, which may jeopardize architects’ creative designs in the near future.


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Structural BIM: Discussion, Case Studies and Latest Developments
Clive Robinson, posted January 2010

This paper discusses the current state of building information modelling (BIM) from the structural point of view, incorporating the migration from 2D to 3D solutions.


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The CAD-tool 2.0 morphological scheme of non-orthogonal high-rise
Dr. Karel Vollers, posted January 2010

Non-orthogonal high-rise buildings are emerging with an increasing degree of geometrical variation. As yet no scheme categorises data on the basis of the overall geometries of such buildings.

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Case Study: Trump International Hotel & Tower
William F. Baker, Paul James, Richard F. Tomlinson, and Andrew Weiss, posted January 2010

Trump Tower rises from the heart of the city, at a point where the Chicago River curves gently to the southwest. Its 401 N. Wabash address is the former site of the low-rise Chicago Sun-Times building.







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