Thornton Tomasetti, the international engineering firm, has received an American Institute of Steel Construction (AISC) IDEAS2 Merit Award for its work on Cincinnati’s Great American Tower at Queen City Square roof-top tiara.

Thornton Tomasetti, the international engineering firm, has been recognized by the American Council of Engineering Companies of New York (ACEC-NY) with two 2012 Excellence in Engineering Awards at the Council’s annual gala held on March 24.

Thornton Tomasetti, the international engineering firm, was the structural project engineer for the Pennsylvania State University Millennium Science Complex, home of the new Life and Materials Science programs for the University.

Two projects for which Thornton Tomasetti provided structural engineering services, Altra Sede Regione Lombardia and Bank of Oklahoma (BOK) Center, have been named award winners by the National Council of Structural Engineers Association for its 2011 Excellence in Structural Engineering Awards. Thornton Tomasetti was recognized at NCSEA’s 19th Annual Conference, October 20 – 22 at the Renaissance Oklahoma City Convention Center.

Thornton Tomasetti, the international engineering firm, received three IDEAS² National Certificates of Recognition from the American Institute of Steel Construction (AISC) for its structural design of Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, N.Y., New Meadowlands Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J. and the Viva ELVIS Theater at ARIA Resort in Las Vegas, N.V.

Thornton Tomasetti won two awards at the Structural Engineers Association of Metropolitan Washington’s (SEA-MW) Excellence in Structural Engineering Awards Gala on February 26, 2011 at the Willard Intercontinental Hotel in Washington, D.C.

Several engineers at Thornton Tomasetti, the international engineering firm with practices in building structure, building skin and building performance, are featured speakers at the 2010 North American Steel Construction Conference (NASCC).

Thornton Tomasetti, the international engineering firm with practices in building structure, building skin and building performance, is the recipient of the Structural Engineers Association of Kansas & Missouri (SEAKM) 2010 Grand Prize for Engineering Excellence Award for its work on the CONSOL Energy Center in Pittsburgh, Penn.

Joseph Burns will moderate a panel on “Minimizing Change Orders Through BIM Utilization” at the 2010 Airport Consultants Council/American Association of Airport Executives Airport Planning, Design & Construction Symposium.

“Tall and Supertall Buildings: Structure and Skin Performance” will be a feature topic at the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, at the Renaissance Hotel & Convention Centre, Mumbai, February 3 – 5.

Thornton Tomasetti, the international engineering firm with practices in building structure, building skin and building performance, was the structural engineer for three New York-based projects receiving top honors from New York Construction magazine.

Bank of Oklahoma (BOK) Center has received top honors from the American Institute of Steel Construction (AISC) and the Structural Engineers of Kansas & Missouri (SEAKM).

On May 21, 2009, Tower B, completed in 2008, was honored with the prestigious International Real Estate Federation “FIABCI Prix d’Excellence” award in the office building category, awarded to Mirax Group – Federation Tower’s well known Russian developer.

Thornton Tomasetti, Inc. has been honored with Autodesk’s Revit BIM Experience Award for its use of Revit Structure to coordinate structural design and analysis and to collaborate with other design disciplines using the Revit platform.

The Stadium Business Awards has named the LIVESTRONG Sporting Park in Kansas as the world’s best sports venue over the past year.

This fully integrated Building Team opted for a multi-prime contracting strategy to keep construction going on Chicago’s Rush University Medical Center, despite the economic meltdown.

Construction work on Baha Mar’s $2.6 billion Cable Beach redevelopment is “one-third complete”, a senior executive said yesterday, after hitting a “significant milestone” with the installation of the last of 2,550 foundation pilings.

Even in midconstruction, there are moments touring the Barclays Center in Prospect Heights when you can’t help but feel extreme joy.

The article looks at our use of a curved steel frame double-wall system at the Cathedral of Hope, Interfaith Peace Chapel in Dallas, Texas.

Rush University Medical Center opened its new facility Friday morning on the Near West Side.

At their annual meeting in Oklahoma City, OK on October 22, NCSEA announced the winners of the 2011 Excellence in Structural Engineering Awards.

About half of the steel is now in place at the Barclays Center, as NY1 saw on a recent tour with developer Bruce Ratner.

The new Winspear Opera House in Dallas redefines the essence of an opera house for the twenty first century, breaking down barriers to make opera more accessible for a wider audience.

Baha Mar, billed as the largest single-phase resort development in the history of the Caribbean, celebrated another milestone with the driving of the first of 5,700 pilings on yesterday.

Sunil Gulati, head of U.S. soccer, summed up the general impression by calling it “the best stadium of its size on earth.”

Designed to become a strong local landmark Villa In The Sky tower by noted Henning Larsen Architects will span over 34 floors on a special location in the King Abdullah Financial District in Riyad.

SEA-MW held its fifth annual awards gala at the Willard Intercontinental in Washington, DC on Saturday, February 26, 2011.

Pittsburgh’s new ice hockey arena, the CONSOL Energy Center, is the first in the National Hockey League to achieve gold certification in the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) program.

CONSOL Energy Center has been named the “Best NHL Arena” in the sixth annual Sports Business Journal readers’ survey on the state of the sports industry.

The 121-story Shanghai Tower is more than China’s next record-setting building: It’s an economic lifeline for the elite club of skyscraper builders.

The project team built a new steel frame to hold an independent glass wall system around one of Indianapolis’ most recognizable buildings, replacing a surface damaged by storm winds.

The erection of steel began today at the Barclays Center at Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn, Bruce Ratner, Chairman and CEO of Forest City Ratner Companies, the developer of the arena, said today. The first components for vertical construction, including beams, girders and trusses, will be used for the main arena, façade support and the canopy.

Much of the state is still slogging through a slow-to-recover economy. But in Fayetteville, the broader region around Fort Bragg and even as far away as the Triangle, planners are bracing for an influx of about 40,000 people who are expected to come with – or follow – two major Army commands moving to Fort Bragg.

It was a perfect start for Penguins fans attending the first exhibition hockey game in CONSOL Energy Center Wednesday.

Those winners include, of course, the top prize of Overall Project of the Year, which, this year, was claimed by the team that designed and built the New Meadowlands Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J. The project will be honored at the Best Of 2010 awards program in December.

CONSOL Energy Center has achieved LEED Gold certification, becoming the first NHL arena to reach that standard of sustainability, it was announced today by the Pittsburgh Penguins and the Sports & Exhibition Authority.

How do you keep football fans as regular visitors to stadiums when the television coverage of every play is so good?

The tiara was placed on the Great American Tower at Queen City Square on Tuesday, July 13, 2010.

After a wonderful evening dinner with old friends (and some new ones!) along the beautiful shore of Biscanye Bay I settled into the AIA Convention’s activities with several BIM sessions on the agenda for Thursday and Friday. The first of these was a session titled BIM for Building Skins: The Future of Facade Design, Engineering, Fabrication, and Construction. This was an event sponsored by Thornton Tomasetti and presented by Mark E. Dannettel, LEED AP, and Joseph Burns, PE, SE, FAIA.

The complexity of the new Margot and Bill Winspear Opera House is fully realized not just in the design and painstaking construction of its complex, one-of-a-kind components but also in the management of the process that brought it to fruition.

NFL owners voted Tuesday to put the 48th Super Bowl in the new $1.6 billion Meadowlands Stadium that this season will become home to the New York Jets and New York Giants. It’s the first time the league has gone to a cold-weather site that doesn’t have a dome, and those places couldn’t even bid on the big game until now.

If the trend in baseball stadiums is intimacy, in football, it is grandeur. And the New Meadowlands Stadium, the home of the Jets and the Giants, is certainly imposing.

When Mark Lamping talked about a truly soft opening of the New Meadowlands Stadium, the chief executive of the $1.6 billion home for the Giants and Jets wasn’t kidding.

Mark Lamping, President and CEO of the New Meadowlands stadium, takes the Associated Press on a tour of the future home of the New York Jets and New York Giants.

When President Obama threw out the first pitch at the Washington Nationals’ season opener on Monday, he kicked off not only a new baseball season but also a new round of fundraisers at Nationals Park.

An article about the state of the New Jersey construction industry, “Head Above Water,” notes the near completion of the New Meadowlands Stadium. Vice President Armindo Guimaraes Monteiro discusses our use of Revit on the project.

Mirax Group will continue the construction of a Moscow skyscraper set to be one of the tallest buildings in Europe, an executive said on Wednesday.

Despite years of protests and lawsuits meant to stop it, ground is being broken on the new arena for the Nets in Brooklyn today. Work has been going on at the Atlantic Yards site in Prospect Heights since last fall, but those involved say today’s groundbreaking marks the next phase in construction of the 18,000-seat Barclays Center.

Now that Atlantic Yards is all but cleared for construction, Forest City Ratner is showing off what the interior will look like.

This nearly 800-foot-tall tower’s pleated curtain wall is more than just an intriguing design gesture.

Hundreds of contractors and local leaders crowded together at the corner of Third and Sycamore streets Tuesday to look on as the final steel beam was lifted into place for The Great American Tower at Queen City Square.

The 194,000-square-foot facility will be a place where teaching, learning and research come together in an integrated way, with the research providing content for the curriculum and with students learning through exploration of real-world problems, according to architects Ayers/Saint/Gross of Baltimore.

A modern interpretation of a traditional performance venue, the design of the new Margot and Bill Winspear Opera House in Dallas, emerged from the close cooperation on the part of engineers, architects and acoustical and theatrical experts that enabled them to overcome such noise and vibration challenges as the structure’s proximity to a major freeway and its location directly beneath the flight path of a Dallas airport.

Now that you’ve figured out building information modeling (BIM), here’s another three-letter acronym for you to master: IPD. Integrated project delivery (IPD) is a project delivery approach that uses business structures, practices, and processes to encourage the early contribution of knowledge and experience by key project stakeholders.

The international membership organisation BuildingSMART officially launched its Middle East chapter last week with its Build Smart 2009 conference, entitled Better Construction Through Interoperability.

While other cities are tightening their belts, Dallas is polishing its buckle

Texas wouldn’t be the premier location when one considers a foray into the world of the arts, or at least it wouldn’t have, until now. Billed as the most significant cultural complex in America since New York’s Lincoln Centre, the $354-million Dallas Centre for the Performing Arts is set to open next month to complete the city’s 25 year vision for the 68 acre arts district.

“Ruth’s New Digs,” (starting on page 28) covers our work as structural engineer on Yankee Stadium in New York.

When the most storied franchise in sports decides to replace the most historic ballpark in baseball, challenges would be expected at every level—political, budget and schedule, fan expectation, and historical reverence. To meet these challenges, the New York Yankees and developer Tishman Speyer assembled an all-star design team. The result is a new Yankee Stadium that respects its rich history, while achieving a facility with cutting-edge design and fan amenities.

Brad Malmsten provides an update on our work on Moscow’s Federation Tower, the tallest building in Europe, on page 34.

It’s certainly not your average building project by any stretch of the imagination – a 2.2 million square foot, open-air sports facility with a contract value in excess of $1 billion, boasting 82,500 stadium seats and 217 luxury suites, and utilizing 3,000 pieces of precast concrete and 23,000 tons of structural steel during construction

Contractors have heard a lot of lofty claims about building information modeling in recent years: millions of dollars in savings, months of schedule gains and greater quality control. Now, as the technology gains broader acceptance in the contracting world, many of those promises are turning out to be real payoffs.

Practically in the center of the country, the city of Tulsa, Okla. seems as good as any a focal point for the new $178 million, 18,500-seat Bank of Oklahoma (BOK) Center, and there’s even more incentive for teams and musicians to drop in.

The main lesson learned by the construction manager who recently completed a pioneering four-year, BIM-enabled project to build a replacement ballpark for the New York Yankees is “the more trades modeling, the merrier,” says James Barrett, manager of virtual design and construction for Turner Construction Co., the CM at-risk.

Pittsburgh’s developing Consol Energy Center lies in the shadow of Mellon Arena, but the road for the NHL Penguins to secure their planned new home was anything but short.

Thanks to federal largesse and the Legislature’s only override of a Tim Pawlenty veto, Minnesota now boasts the most aggressive highway bridge repair and replacement program in the nation.

Yankee Stadium is the kind of stoic, self-conscious monument to history that befits the most successful franchise in American sports.

Contradicting the National Transportation Safety Board’s report that blamed too-thin gusset plates for the Aug. 1, 2007, collapse of the Minneapolis Interstate 35W bridge, an independent analysis has concluded that rusted, frozen roller bearings prevented thermal expansion and caused a truss chord to fail, triggering the gusset-plate failure. The analysis by Thornton Tomasetti, New York City, using forensic bridge information modeling, was presented to victims’ families and will be deployed in an anticipated lawsuit

Experts from engineering consultancy Thornton Tomasetti believe that the initiating event wasn’t the fracture of a key gusset plate in the bridge, but the failure of a horizontal beam.

An engineering firm hired by attorneys for victims of the Interstate 35W bridge collapse says the cause of the disaster was not undersized gusset plates but the failure of a nearby beam, a lawyer for the victims said Wednesday. The firm’s findings directly contradict the conclusion reached by the National Transportation Safety Board.

Lawyers for more than 100 bridge collapse victims say the National Transportation Safety Board reached the wrong conclusion about the 35W bridge collapse. A consortium of lawyers hired the international consulting firm Thorton Tomasetti to investigate the collapse. The firm also investigated the collapse of the World Trade Center.

The National Transportation Safety Board got the cause of the Interstate 35W bridge collapse wrong, the lead lawyer for most victims of the disaster asserted. The lawyer, Chris Messerly, said experts from the engineering firm Thornton Tomasetti Inc. told survivors and families of victims Tuesday night that the “initiating event” was not the fracture of a key gusset plate in the Minneapolis bridge, as the safety board concluded, but the failure of a horizontal beam called a chord.

Experts hired by attorneys for victims of the Interstate 35W bridge collapse say the National Transportation Safety Board got the cause of the disaster wrong, their lead attorney said Wednesday.

Building Information Modeling has become as ubiquitous as the idea of “green.” Given the economic recession that has cooled the area’s building boom, BIM has become the industry’s next great hope.

Built From Disaster is a six part documentary series about man-made structures – and how engineers and designers across the world have learned the lessons from tragic disasters of design.

The online edition of New York Construction recently published a series of construction photos of New Meadowlands Stadium, for which Thornton Tomasetti is the structural engineer.

Students and faculty at the University of Michigan’s Stephen M. Ross School of Business have spent the last few weeks settling into a gleaming new $145 million state-of-the-art building on the Ann Arbor campus.

The New York Times building exemplifies the idea of transparency in reporting by wearing part of its structural frame on the outside.

Architect Renzo Piano made his mark along with his partner Richard Rodgers, in the design of the renowned Pompidou Centre in Paris.

For nearly a century, the New York Times Company and its most celebrated newspaper had been headquartered in the heart of Manhattan near Times Square. But when the media giant outgrew its site and the surrounding area underwent extensive commercial redevelopment, the firm’s owners decided to construct a new headquarters building. Their goal: a structure in which the levels of technical and architectural sophistication would mirror the firm’s leading role within the media industry.

September 25 will mark a new era in hospital building and design as Rush University Medical Center celebrates the groundbreaking for its new hospital designed “from the inside out.”

“Changing the Way We Deliver Stadiums,” is the cover story about our work on the Washington, D.C. Nationals Ballpark, Yankee Stadium, and the New Meadowlands Stadium.

Thornton Tomasetti’s Mark Tamaro, Jeffrey D’Andrea and Lucas Nisley describe the design-build process for the new Nationals Park in Washington DC.

Bridge engineers and software providers are adapting and customizing building information modeling techniques for everything from new designs to forensics. But an industry-wide standard for such modeling remains to be seen.

“Every resident of the District of Columbia should be proud that we have not only the greatest ballpark in the country but also the greenest.”

- Adrian M. Fenty, mayor of Washington, DC

The periodical’s cover story, “Are You Ready for BIM?” features the Washington, D.C. Nationals Stadium with a special report on how the Thornton Tomasetti D.C. office used BIM.

The Washington Nationals Ballpark made the cover of the April 2008 ASCE issue, and the story, “A Capitol Investment,” was written by Mark Tamaro, Jeff D’Andrea and Lucas Nisley.

Three-dimensional information, such as that provided by building information modeling, allows all members of the Building Team to visualize the many components of a project and how they work together. BIM and other 3D tools convey the idea and intent of the designer to the entire Building Team and lay the groundwork for integrated project delivery.

In a sign of the intensifying political turmoil surrounding the investigation of the Interstate 35W bridge collapse, Congress will publicly question the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) next month about its investigation, including the agency’s refusal to hold a hearing of its own.

What with demand for housing and offices seemingly as far as ever from being saturated and land plots in permanently short supply, it’s clear that the real estate market is going to drive Moscow upwards.

The New York Times Building in Manhattan, New York, is the best in clever and yet subtle architecture but its designers have bucked the trend and not tried for LEED accreditation, opting instead to build for user comfort. Does this bode well for skyscraper design in the 21st Century?

With only 23 months to complete all the bases, the team building the 85%-complete D.C. Major League baseball park is getting very close to hitting
construction’s equivalent of a grand slam off a 100- mph pitch. If it opens April 1 as planned, the $611-million for the Washington Nationals will break the speed record for major-league ballpark construction.

The Old Patent Office Building in Washington, D.C., completed in 1867, houses two Smithsonian Institution museums—the National Portrait Gallery and the American Art Museum. Collections include portraits of all U.S. presidents, along with paintings, sculptures, prints, and drawings of numerous historic figures from American history, and the works of more than 7,000 American artists.

Stadium and arena projects worth nearly $3 billion are currently under construction in the New York City metropolitan area, and another $1 billion is under consideration.

In February 2006, the Washington DC Sports and Entertainment Commission authorized Clark/Hunt/Smoot A Joint Venture to construct a $611 million ballpark for the Washington DC Nationals baseball team, to be completed for opening day of the 2008 season.

The 52-story tower will have large amounts of exposed steel elements supporting an innovative curtain wall, requiring an intensive fabrication and installation effort.

With its shimmering skin of high-quality clear glass and ceramic rods that will appear to change color as light hits from different angles, the 1.6-million-sq.-ft. New York Times building has a chance to become an icon of New York City’s skyline.

Tall buildings are getting greener. Or green buildings are getting taller. Either way you slice it, the sustainability movement in the U.S. has gone large-scale and skyward, and nowhere is this more apparent than in New York City.

At a news organization, truth is the top priority. The design of a signature, headquarters property for The New York Times Co., one of the most prominent news organizations in the world, required truth as well.

In a delicate operation that has been compared to pulling off a tablecloth without breaking any china, contractors at Milwaukee’s Miller Park have completed the replacement of pivot bearings for the stadium’s operable roof.