The Terminal: not just a Spielberg movie but architecture at extremes (Denver, CO)

The Wright Brothers flew for the first time in 1903, then moved inland to set up their first airfield, a century ago in 1904. This was the 84 acre Huffman Prairie, a cow pasture near their home town of Dayton, Ohio. Here the first-ever passenger and cargo flights took place. Huffman Prairie eventually led to a phenomenon of today such as Denver Airport, Colorado, with its signature white-peaked tented terminal roof, designed by architects Fentress Bradburn. The terminal is huge but the entire airport, a key North American hub, is huger. It is by no means the busiest in the world (Heathrow and Atlanta dispute that accolade), but it is the largest. Denver airport had cost $3.3 billion by the time its first phase was opened in 1995, and it is designed to more than double in size. It has six runways, none of which intersect, and will eventually have 13. It covers 53 square miles. That is twice the area of Manhattan and 400 times the size of Huffman Prairie.

The question is, what happens now? A surprising number of people apparently live unofficially in airports, despite all the surveillance. Spielberg's Navorsky character is very loosely based on the real-life case of Merhan Karmimi Nasseri, an Iranian asylum-seeker victim caught up in Kafka-esque bureaucracy. Nasseri has been living in Paris Charles de Gaulle airport since 1988. He is free to leave now but chooses not to: it is his home.

Spielberg and his writers develop this into the notion of an airport as that old movie stand-by, a microcosm of society. The coming and going of planes scarcely matters: it exists as an organism in its own right. This is surely correct. Good architecture should be flexible enough to do anything. Its greatest challenge is for real architects to do what the magic-dust of movies can do: make airports more human. That means thinking of them as real villages, towns and cities, not isolated holding-pens. It is quite some task for the airport architects and designers of the 21st century.

The World Islands, Dubai

The World Islands are a collection of man-made islands shaped into the continents of the world. It will consist of over 250 to 300 small private artifical islands divided into four categories - private homes, estate homes, dream resorts, and community islands. Each island will range from 250,000 to 900,000 square feet in size, with 50 to 100 metres of water between each island. It will cover a total area of 9 kilometers (5.4 miles) in length and 6 kilometers (3.6 miles) in width, surrounded by an oval shaped breakwater. The only means of transportation between the islands will be by marine transport.
The World Islands will be located 4 kilometers off the shore of Jumeirah, close to the Palm Jumeirah, between Burj Al Arab and Port Rashid. Each island will be sold to selected private developers and are expected to have pricing beginning at AED 25 million (US$ 6.85 million), for the AED 6.6 billion (US$ 1.8 billion) project.

www.theworld.dubai-city.de/

Burj Al Arab Hotel, Dubai

Built:1999
Also known as:Island Of Arabia
Also known as:Arabia Tower
Designed by:W.S. Atkins and Partners
Maximum Height:321 meters
Stories:60
Type:Hotel
Observation point:Yes
Location:Jumeirah Beach Road

If there's one thing Dubai excels at it's building magnificent hotels. The Burj Al Arab exemplifies this talent. It is ideally situated to take advantage of the natural beauty of the area by providing spectacular views in nearly every direction. Nature returns the gesture by lighting up its glass exterior with awe-inspiring sunset reflections. Inside, the views are just as spectacular with gold leaf, extravagant art, and sumptuous marble at every turn. Some have criticized the hotel's interior for being too conspicuously glitzy. But when you're spending US$1,000 a night for a room, it better not be decorated by Ikea. As if building a spectacularly beautiful hotel wasn't enough, the Burj Al Arab rests on its own man-made island. The effect is to surround its visitors with the sea, and from a distance to make the building's arched form seem like a sail, allowing the hotel to break away from the land and take voyages through the Arabian Gulf on its own. For those who choose to travel by air, a helipad projects from the building 200 meters off the ground. The people of Dubai are proud of their creation. Proud enough that at one time its image adorned the emirate's license plates.

The atrium is 180 meters tall.
One of the restaurants is accessed via submarine.

Petronas' Towers

At 1483 feet (452m) tall, the tallest building in the world at the date of its completion, measured to the highest point. However, the Sears Tower in Chicago still has the highest occupied building floor, more than 200 feet higher than the highest occupied floor of the Petronas Towers.

Each of the twin Petronas Towers is 88 stories plus an additional architectural point (at 1242 feet), plus a tall spire to 1483 feet. Compare to the Sears Tower in Chicago which is 110 stories, and the twin World Trade Center towers in New York, which were each 110 stories. Although these other skyscrapers were created with higher occupied floors, they are not considered as tall under the arcane rules used for rating the world's tallest, according to which architectural spires count towards building height, but antennas atop a building do not.

Chicago's vides: Part II

Chicago's architecture is unique, is has long been connected with some of the field's most important name... and it's where skyscrapers were born!

Some of the important buildings you can find in Chicago are:
* Manhattan Bld. designed by William Le Baron Jenney
* Old Colony Bld. designed by Holabird & Roche
* Fisher Bld. designed by Burnham & Co.
* Monadnock Bld. designed by Burnham & Root, Holabird & Roche
* Federal Center designed by Mies Van Der Rohe
* And the Jail Bld, Marquette Bld, LaSalle Bld, Inland Steel Bld, First National Bank, Carson Pirie Scott Bld.

All of those (and for sure more), are rich in good and unique architecture... a good reason to us for visiting the Windy City.

Freedom Tower, NY

The design for the Freedom Tower, the 1,776 foot tower that some claim will be the tallest building in the world, was released to the public at Federal Hall on December 19, 2003.

The building was originally a concept of Daniel Libeskind, the architect who designed the site plan for Ground Zero. The tower itself was a major selling point of the plan, and earned Libeskind the weighty endorsement of Governor George Pataki. Larry Silverstein, the developer who owns the rights to build at Ground Zero, was not as impressed, complaining that the site did not call for enough office space. Silverstein brought in David Childs of Skidmore Owings and Merrill to adapt the Freedom Tower concept to his needs.

What followed was a fiery collaboration between Childs, who was named the building's lead architect, and Libeskind, who was assigned the role of collaborating architect. It was not clear exactly what role either man held, though, and the struggle between the two became so bitter that as of last week they were reportedly not even on speaking terms.

There was at least the appearance of a hatchet burying at Federal Hall, with Childs praising Libeskind's plan and being careful to describe his tower as an adaptation that tried to stay true to his collaborator's original vision. Libeskind skirted the issue of Childs' changes altogether, speaking mainly of the building's relationship to the Statue of Liberty. The collaboration, he conceded, was difficult, saying that "is not just a couple of meetings. It's a struggle to make something great."

Brick

Definitions:

brick: molded rectangular block of clay baked by the sun or in a kiln until hard and used a building and paving material

common brick: brick made for general building purposes and not specially treated for color and texture. Also called "building brick."

facing brick: brick made of special clays for facing a wall, often treated to produce the desired color and surface tension. Also called "face brick."

glazed brick: brick that has a coating of colored, opaque, or transparent material applied before firing Governor's Palace, Williamsburg, VA

Roman brick: brick having nominal dimensions of 4x2x12 in. (economy brick: 4x4x8 in.) Favored by Frank Lloyd Wright in his prairie homes. Also found in the Williams-Butler mansion. Rarely manufactured today.

efflorescence: a white, powdery deposit that forms on an exposed masonry or concrete surface, caused by the leaching and crystallization of soluble salts from within the material

course: a row of bricks

header: short side of the brick faces out

stretcher: long side of the brick faces out

Interesting Links:

http://ah.bfn.org/a/DCTNRY/mat/brk/

Iron & Steel

Lab: Chicago´s video

I really enjoyed watching the Chicago Video, it was really interesting. I liked how it was made and all the interesting stuff they showed. It gave me a brief but good idea of what was Chicago before and now-a-days… I didn’t know that many years ago, before Chicago was what it is today, it was all made of wood, and that just a spark in a farm, changed its history, and made of it, what we know today as de Windy City.

By the way, I did know that Chicago had so many great buildings, but I didn’t know that it has so many great architectural history.

Making a good paragraph

To write a good paragraph, youll´ve to have in mind several things that will make your paragraph, a good one.

* Choose a topic and express it through a sentence: that sentence is called the topic sentence.
* Then, write about that topic, completing and adding information. Those sentences are known as comments.
* Putting the comments all together: you must use words called transitions, those words will help connecting those comments.

Notice, that these three things doesn’t have to be done in that order,

you’ll just have to keep them in mind in order to make a good paragraph!