Collaborative BIM: Xishi Winter Olympics Square Project Transforms Historic Industrial Zone
The 2022 Winter Olympics Organizing Committee contracted Beijing Shougang International Engineering (BSIE) to design and construct an office plaza in Shougang, a historic industrial park in Shijingshan District, Beijing, China. The project called for innovative planning due to challenging site conditions and various regulations. Many of the original steel plants were protected, and strict requirements governed the height and architectural style of the buildings being redeveloped. The challe...
Fire Safety for High-Rise Mass-Timber Buildings
By David Barber, Principal, Arup Buildings constantly change and develop as architects, engineers and scientists innovate and develop new products and construction methods. Interest has been growing worldwide in the design and construction of high-rise timber buildings, which are increasing in number throughout Europe and other parts of the world, as engineered mass-timber products such as glulam and cross-laminated timber (CLT) become more popular. In the United States, high-rise buildings us...
Engineered Solutions: IKEA Project Sets New Stormwater Management Standard
Developers of a new IKEA store in Jacksonville, Fla., wanted to make this project a model of sustainable, forward-thinking design. A big part of this plan was an underground stormwater management system that would be the largest ever installed in the southeastern United States. Along with the size of the installation, developers faced the task of coordinating runoff from a variety of sources into six separate basins around the building, while also meeting state and local regulations that requir...
Engineered Solutions: New Bridge in Hawaii Forest Replaces Roadway Prone to Flooding
Acrow Bridge designed and provided a permanent bridge to Mocon Construction for vehicle and pedestrian use in the Keahua Arboretum in the Keahua State Forest in Kauai, Hawaii. Planted with native plants and vegetation introduced by the University of Hawaii, the arboretum also is enjoyed for picnicking, swimming, hiking, biking and horseback riding. The original route, a concrete roadway, had sunk over time and flooded after heavy rains. Safe passage over the Keahua Stream wasn’t always possible...
From the Editor: Infrastructure (and Humans) Under Siege
On Aug. 24, 2017, Hurricane Harvey made landfall near Rockport, Texas, as a Category 4 hurricane. For the next five days, the storm dumped a historic amount of rain on the second-largest state in the union before heading back out to the Gulf of Mexico. On Aug. 29, 2017, Harvey made landfall a second time, this time in Louisiana, wreaking havoc before dissipating two days later. When the skies finally cleared, 82 people had lost their lives, and the states suffered an estimated $70 billion to $1...
'Out of Tolerance’ before 'Out of Time'
DPR Avoids Construction Delays with Automated Verification Software By Kevin P. Corbley A general contractor avoided what could have been a significant delay in the exterior shelling of a new multi-story retail building by finding twisted, missing and poorly aligned steel beams in the interior structure. The company used automated construction verification software to analyze 3D laser scans of the steel framework to identify precisely where as-built conditions deviated from the design mode...
Engineered Solutions: Autodesk InfraWorks: Not Just for “Mega Projects”
Even Pump Stations Get the Blues 3D Visual Presentation Pushes Wastewater Project Forward The retrofit of a wet-well/dry-well pump station into a submersible pump station isn’t normally the type of project that requires a glossy 3D model as part of design work—most firms would reserve that for more glamorous, higher-profile infrastructure such as a railway station or a new bridge. But for Wright-Pierce, a nine-office, employee-owned consulting firm based in New England and Florida, it made...
Industrial IoT: Fulfilling the Promise of the Digital Oilfield
By Tal Avrahami The price of crude oil began a precipitous decline from its summer-2014 highs of approximately $110 per barrel to a bottom near $25 per barrel in the winter of 2016. Few would have forecast that almost three years after falling off that cliff, the price of crude would remain stubbornly low in a price band around $50 per barrel. What initially appeared to be a short-term market correction now looks more like an indefinite disruption to the days of $80-100 per barrel oil that...
Infrastructure Outlook: Why Isn’t Infrastructure Relevant?
America has a life-threatening infrastructure problem. Recent events in Houston and Miami have underscored both the need for infrastructure investment and its critical role in public safety. Yet despite natural disasters and a stream of almost daily news of failing bridges, broken water mains, antiquated air-traffic control technology and patchwork electric grids, Americans remain alarmingly complacent. This lack of urgency is ironic given that the wisdom of investing in our nation’s roads, bri...
Stormwater Management: D.C.’s Capitol Crossing Project Takes Innovative Approach
Stormwater management is a challenge for most cities, but this is particularly true for highly urbanized areas such as Washington, D.C., where there’s little remaining open space for conventional stormwater management infrastructure such as detention or retention ponds. Under federal law, the city is required to control the amount of stormwater that enters its local watersheds (Potomac and Anacostia) and reduce the amount of pollutants the stormwater contains. District agencies, such as the Dep...
Stormwater Interview with Robert Page, P.E., Vice President, HNTB
Santa Barbara County North Branch Jail Expansion
February Issue 2026
