Oil Boom Towns

Black gold buys metropolitan status

The Wall Street Journal reported on April 11, 2007, that a plan was unveiled for a 68-story skyscraper in Dubai where each floor rotates every 90 minutes. The architect, David Fisher, calls it "dynamic architecture." The newspaper reported that Fisher's eureka moment came as he listened to a friend in Florida talk about the large difference in pricing for condos that face the ocean and those that do not.
Fisher's design team includes Leslie Robertson, the innovator behind the World Trade Center design. Interestingly, the designers don't seem to anticipate large construction costs, and argue their design is rather straightforward, it just looks different. All except the all important issue of plumbing. WSJ quotes Robertson as saying, "We have good people working on that." Indicating, in as many words, that it's a technical challenge.



Dubai Marina at night.


The fact that the designers are targetting Dubai, one of the 7 emirates of the UAE, is a reflection of the building boom going on in the tiny Middle Eastern nation. Understanding that oil wealth will not last forever, the country's ruler Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum is looking to shape Dubai into a world financial center, and tourist haven.
The country is set to debut the region's first commodities futures exchange, in a joint venture with NYMEX. The commodity the so-called Dubai Merc will focus on first is, of course, oil. Specifically, the Dubai Merc hopes to become a trading center for Arabian Gulf sour crude, the flavor of oil that makes up much of the world's energy markets. Already Dubai crude is a benchmark for Middle Eastern oil flowing to the Asia-Pacific region. In contrast, NYMEX in the U.S. has a huge market based on setting prices for benchmarks Brent crude (from the North Atlantic Sea) and West Texas Intermediate (from West Texas).
To house its burgeoning non-petroleum industry, the country is undergoing a building boom. [Emporis lists 1,087 buildings in Dubai.] It is in the process of building what will be world's largest building, the Burj Dubai (2,300 feet tall; ETA: 2009), and is planning another building known as "The Burj," meaning "the tower" which would be 3,281-feet tall, or 1 kilometer!
Just 90 miles away from Dubai another boom town is forming in Abu Dhabi, a fellow UAE member.
With a similar story to Dubai, Abu Dhabi also hopes to become a regional hotspot. A Fortune Magazine article recently named Abu Dhabi the "richest city in the world." [Author: Barney Gimbel] The reason: Abu Dhabi's 420,000 citizens, excluding foreign workers, have an average net worth of $17 million each. [Emporis lists 215 buildings in Abu Dhabi.]
Just 15 minutes away from one another by plane, Fortune article points out a friendly rivalry between Dubai and Abu Dhabi. So far, however, Dubai has won the public relations campaign, drawing the bulk of recognition. And in March 2007, Halliburton, famous/infamous for its Vice President Dick Cheney affiliation, announced it would move its corporate headquarters to Dubai--although its 12,000 workers at its current HQ in Houston, Texas, would stay put. GEO

Rapid Manufacturing

Just press CTRL+P for a new home

Discovery News reported recently on an outfit in the U.K. that's hoping to build a system that will "print" an entire room of a house.
The process uses techniques from the rapid prototyping industry, which allows engineers and designers to convert CAD drawings into 3D plastic models.
A leader in rapid prototyping is Stratasys, based in the Minneapolis suburb of Eden Prairie. (I wrote an article about the company back in 2005.) Publicly traded, Stratasys has been in rapid prototyping for many years. The founder & CEO Scott Cramp developed a prototype for his first machine working in his spare time from home.
Ultimately, Cramp sees rapid prototyping evolving into rapid manufacturing. To that end, Stratasys began working with NASA to put a machine on the International Space Station that can print out replacement parts in supertough polycarbonate plastics or other plastic materials. Like in Star Trek, NASA will be able to "beam up" plans for the required parts, that will then be produced in situ.
Back then rapid manufacturing was already happening. Just down the road from Stratasys, in fact. Eden Prairie-based company, MTS, had a subsidiary called AeroMet Corp. that used Stratasys software in a process it calls laser additive manufacturing. Using a laser and powdered metal, AeroMet can build structures up to 12 feet long that can be aerospace grade quality. (MTS closed down the operation in 2005, however.)
Stratasys is now in the rapid manufacturing business through a license technology that produces metal parts. The company calls the process "direct digital manufacturing."
So given all that development, it doesn't seem crazy that this U.K. firm is looking to use mineral-based construction materials to build a room one layer at a time.
The article reports: "The machine will either squeeze out the moist material like toothpaste from a tube or it work like a large ink-jet printer head to place drops of the material in the precise location. The material will be designed to harden in the air and will not require a laser to fuse the layers together.
Such precision will allow designers to incorporate elements into walls that would otherwise have to be built in separately. For example, the walls could have holes to accommodate doors and windows. They could be built with a honeycomb structure for insulation. Or they could contain hollow sections that serve as conduits for piping or electrical wires."
It opens up new ways of thinking about home construction, which could impact tomorrow's suburbia. GEO

All the World's a City

Is skyfarming the wave of the future?

After last month's fascinating article comparing London and New York, New York Magazine does it again with another mind-opening story on "vertical farms." That is, using skyscrapers as centers of agriculture.
The NY Mag article cites Columbia professor Dr. Dickson Despommier, who says within 10-15 years a "supergreen," 30-story skyscraper could be built that produces fruit, vegetables, and grains while generating clean energy and purifying waste water. He figures 150 such vertical farms could feed the population of New York City proper (~8 million people), about 55,000 people fed per building.
(Similar ideas have long been proferred by advocates of space exploration, who have done endless calculations to prove that giant space stations could grow and feed city-sized populations in orbit around the Earth.)
That's a lot of construction, but according to Emporis, NYC currently has 5,560 high-rise buildings within its 800 square kilometers of land area. And 120 more are under construction, with 120 in the planning stages.
The professor says vertical farming would be able to feed the estimated 9.3 billion people expected to populate Earth in 2050, without using up more land area.The magazine suggests that the land requirements to feed the increase in world population (which now stands at about 6.2 billion) will require cultivation of a landmass area as large as Brazil." And with an estimated 80% of the world's population expected to live in urban areas by 2050, which works out to 7.3 billion citydwellers, why not grow agriculture where it is consumed? GEO