Dive Brief:
- New York City–based DFA Studio has released a concept design for a 712-foot-tall wood tower overlooking Central Park that, it says, could be built in six months using prefabricated construction methods, New Atlas reported.
- The tower's lattice structure is made up of a glulam helix, a structural steel core, a transparent PVC skin and a concrete base and stabilizing cables for anchoring.
- Beyond retail, restaurants and a 360-degree viewing deck, the tower would include a filtration system for the nearby Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir that could allow it to be used as a public pond.
Dive Insight:
Make no mistake, DFA's tower isn't expected to break ground any time soon. However, concept projects like it can be powerful tools in showing the potential for technology or ideas that have yet to gain the traction required to become widely used.
In Chicago, a research team from Perkins+Will, Thornton Tomasetti and the University of Cambridge has developed a concept design for an 80-story, 800-foot-tall mass-timber tower along the Chicago River’s South Branch.
The group is using the phased project to make a case for mass-timber construction, and so it is focusing on understanding what it would take to build a skyscraper solely out of wood. Their current design calls for a structure combining an external diagrid made of laminated veneer lumber with cross-laminated timber sheer walls and glulam bracing.
For the research project's next phase, the team will look at its individual components to see what changes are needed to help move the entire project closer to the performance and cost balance of conventional construction methods. While this project isn't likely to rise fully in Chicago, at least not in the near term, other concept work comes to life at a larger scale, often in the form of small research pavilions and installations.
One of the most prominent examples is the annual project from the Institute for Computational Design and Construction at the University of Stuttgart, in Germany, which focuses on bio-based design. To make this year's pavilion, researchers used drones and industrial-scale robots to emulate the behavior of leaf liner moths' fiber-weaving larvae, using durable threads to wrap a structural form.
