Optimal Design: A Toolkit for the Success of Super Tall Towers

With more than 50% of the human population living in cities, the demand for space has been increasing exponentially. Building vertical and minimizing sprawl provides one of the most sustainable solutions to rapid urbanization.

Compact cities improve the standard of living by reducing travel times and increasing the efficiency of public transportation. This trend means that even in locations where building tall was unimaginable a few years back are now ground for constructions that aim for the sky.

The challenges posed by the design of Super Tall Towers must be met with a special set of tools. International building codes are typically sufficient for the design of most structures, but Super Tall Buildings almost always fall outside the norm where the literal application of many code provisions results in uneconomical and unbuildable designs. Efficient tall buildings inherently demand a more sophisticated performance-based design (PBD) approach that transcends prescriptive standards for the determination of loads and building response. PBD is one of the tools of Optimal Design that enables more transparent and collaborative decision making between owners and designers.

The desire to build big and complex but at the same time build economical structures has led to the need for the development of optimal design procedures that achieve constructability and affordability.

Georgi Petrov is a practicing architect and structural engineer and an Associate in the structures group at the New York office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, where he works on high rises and long-span structures in North America, Asia, and the Middle East. Hailing originally from Bulgaria, he received an M.S. in Structural Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an M.Arch degree from MIT. Petrov is also an Adjunct Professor at NYU Tandon School of Engineering where he lectures on Tall Building Design.

Space is limited — RSVP by Wednesday, April 5th, 2017.

Please contact Deborah Sachare for more Information: ds2784 [[at]] columbia [[dot]] edu (ds2784[at]columbia[dot]edu).