memm blog

Guangzhou TV and Sightseeing Tower, China

The hyperboloid structure is in the form of a twisted and tapering tube. The outer steel-framed structure consists of 24 steel columns with concrete in-fill, a series of 46 oval-shaped rings of different sizes and single-direction diagonals throughout the structure. Over 40,000t of structural steel (including the mast) will be used for the project.

“The position of the core in turn is affected by the desire to have a rotating restaurant at the top of the building. On top of this, any change in the waist size results in a change in density of the structure altering the wind resistance. All these issues affect the amount of structural steel needed to create a stiff structure. This makes this building an example of a complex structure for which intensive studies were done in order to come to an optimised result.”

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“Rem will never toss you a sketch and say ‘this is how I want it’; he’ll demand it from the team to come up with the brilliant ideas. That’s definitely a way of working that releases the full potential of the team,”

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Zaha Hadid said of the void: “The idea was to create curves and openings with a view to the city and landmark buildings that are adjacent. I wanted it to be a very large window to the city, this is where the idea of the void became a critical factor.”

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The beauty of Wiener Werkstätte jewelry — the first products made after the workshops began, in 1903 — lies in the way it blurs the line between precious ornament and miniature sculpture. Seeing jewelry as art was central to the Wiener Werkstätte philosophy. Its ideal was the gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art, in which all elements of art, design and craft cohered into a visually unified entity. [+][++]

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Una vez que Nueva York hubo arrebatado a Chicago el título de ciudad de los rascacielos, éstos ya no pueden ser sino neoyorkinos. Antes de Nueva York sólo está Chicago; después, algunos rascacielos por aquí y por allá, pero sólo una es la «ciudad de los rascacielos», cartel merecido para la ciudad más moderna, de una modernidad aún más hiriente por cuanto vieja y decrépita, de piedra, bronce y ladrillo más que de cristal, polvorienta, por tanto, y no brillante, sino, en todo caso, refulgente de aura, aunque algo quebradiza ya, tanto arriba, en los tapones de radiador de níquel oxidado con que se rematan sus grandes edificios, como abajo, en el traqueteo chirriante de sus metros, audibles a simple vista, valga la paradoja, a través de las rejillas de las aceras de algunas de sus calles, la primera de todas, la grosera y sublime avenida Lexington. Nueva York es la ciudad de la más moderna antiqua novitas, y el Empire State Building es su símbolo, no por otra razón sino por ser el pico de su montaña. Nunca nadie creyó de veras que las insignificantes Twin Towers aventajasen en algo al Empire. [+]