Technology & the Built Environment

For the Hong Kong and Shang Hai headquarters which situated in southern side of statue square near the location of the old City Hall, Hong Kong, it was a building which built with 30,000 tonnes of steel and 4500 tonnes of aluminium. The latest building was designed by a British architect who is Lord Norman Foster and engineers Arup and was built by Wimpey construction. The building achieved 180-metres of height with 47 storeys and four basement levels. The modern construction system was applied in the building through reflection of sunlight with mirrors to save the energy usage. The external facades is fulfil with sun shades to reduce the excessive heat in the building due to direct sunlight. On the other hand, the flooring made with lightweight adjustable panel for the instalment of equipment like computer terminals in the shortest of time. It consists of eight groups of four aluminium-clad steel columns which ascend from the foundations up through the core structure, and five levels of triangular suspension trusses which are locked into these masts.

The Buckminster fuller dome (Montreal Biosphère) was located at Parc Jean-Drapeau. It is a museum in Montreal commit to water and the environment. It originally created an enclosed structure of steel and acrylic cells, 76 metres (250 ft) in diameter and 62 metres (200 ft) high. The complicated system of shades was applied to adjust the heat inside. Basically, it is a structure which design according to the geodesic dome. A geodesic dome is a spherical or partial-spherical shell structure or lattice shell according on a network of great circles (geodesics) placed on the surface of a sphere. The geodesics cross to produce triangular section that have local triangular rigidity and also distribute the tension over the rest of structure. When completed to form a complete sphere, it is known as a geodesic sphere. The term "dome" based to an enclosed structure and should not be mess up with non-enclosed geodesic structures such as geodesic climbers found on playgrounds. Typically the design of a geodesic dome start with an icosahedron inscribed in a sphere, tiling each triangular face with smaller triangles, then projecting the vertices of each tile to the sphere. The endpoints of the links of the completed sphere would then be the projected endpoints on the sphere's surface. If this is done exactly, each of the edges of the sub-triangles is a slightly different length, so it would require a very large number of links of different sizes. To minimize the number of different sizes of links, various simplifications are made. The result is a compromise consisting of a pattern of triangles with their vertices lying approximately on the surface of the sphere. The edges of the triangles form approximate geodesic paths over the surface of the dome that distribute its weight.Geodesic designs can be used to form any curved, enclosed space. Oddly-shaped designs would require calculating for and custom building of each individual strut, vertex or panel—resulting in potentially expensive construction. Because of the expense and complexity of design and fabrication of any geodesic dome, builders have tended to standardize using a few basic designs.

The foster Gherkin known as the Gherkin and the Swiss Re building which was located 30 St Mary Axe, City of London, England. The current tower was designed by Norman Foster. The uses of energy-saving methods is applied in this building which enable this building to use half of the power of alike tower that in use. There was a gap in each floor that provide six shafts to act as the natural ventilation system for the whole building. In addition, a double glazing effect produced by the shafts, the air is trapped by two layers of glazing and cool the office space inside. On the others hand, the shafts enable the sunlight to pass through the building to provide the natural light inside the building and save the cost. The main ways for manipulating wind-excited sways are to add on the flexibility or increase the damping with tuned. “To a design by Arup”, Swiss Re’s fully triangulated perimeter structure makes the building sufficiently stiff without any extra reinforcements. Despite its overall curved glass shape, there is only one piece of curved glass on the building – the lens-shaped cap at the very top.”