Review Category : Articles

By Monica Schultes, PE

The Steel District office development in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, is the first to demonstrate the structural use of ultra-high-performance concrete (UHPC) in a commercial construction application in North America. Gage Brothers was instrumental in converting the design of a nine-story mixed-use building to a total–precast concrete structure. By using 69-foot-long UHPC beams, interior columns were eliminated, allowing open sightlines, more rentable space, and the ability for adaptive reuse in the future.

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By Matt Barnard

Somewhere, the earth is shaking. Earthquakes happen frequently throughout the world but often go unnoticed or are of little concern. Occasionally, earthquakes are much larger with shaking that impacts people and the built environment and cause tremendous loss of life, as we saw last year with the disaster in Turkey. In a world that seems to be more connected than ever, whether through our instantaneous sharing of everything to our global economies and supply chains, we now almost immediately see and then are impacted by these large earthquakes whether we have personally felt the shaking or not.

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By Joan Malana Kennedy

This is part 2 of a 2-part series about the developing issues in access to design data concerning digital collaborative working environments, particularly BIM. Part 1 discussed the background and BIM development in the UK, and the first reported formal dispute involving BIM in the UK, Trant Engineering Limited v Mott MacDonald Ltd [2017] EHWC 2061 (TCC). This article will deal with the lessons learned about TEL v MML [2017] and the implications and applications for designers.

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By Dr. Frank Griggs, Dist. M. ASCE

Click here to view the article with images in the digital flipbook.

Proposals to span the Mississippi River by a bridge were submitted by Charles Ellet, Jr. in 1840 for a 1,200-foot suspension bridge and by John A. Roebling in 1868 for another suspension Bridge. A local engineer by the name of Truman Homer proposed a tubular bridge similar to Stephenson’s Menai Straits Bridge in 1865 with three 500-foot spans. With the opening of several bridges upstream on the Mississippi, the City of St. Louis feared losing its claim as the gateway to the west and started to plan its own bridge. This would require a charter from both Missouri and Illinois as well as the federal government. On February 5, 1864, St. Louis received its charter from Missouri which stated in Section 6:

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Have you ever received a call from a developer asking you to take a look at an old building? Sometimes, they might ask if you could tell them that it’s not feasible to save it so that they can justify tearing it down. Other times, they might ask you whether it’s possible to restore it. We, as structural engineers, need to understand our role in scenarios like this.

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Throughout the construction industry, there is a movement toward sustainability that is affecting what and how we build, and a central part of this movement is the use of low-carbon materials. Although all materials are subject to scrutiny, concrete has received specific attention, and rightfully so, concrete is the most widely used material in the world. On a unit mass basis, concrete has one of the lowest carbon footprints of all manufactured materials.

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STRUCTURE magazine