Review Category : Uncategorized

By Brian MacRae, P.E., S.E., Kerem Gulec, Ph.D., P.E., S.E.

The ambitious goal of transforming the existing Key Arena in Seattle, Washington, into a world-class sports and concert venue was undertaken by its owners at Oak View Group, who challenged the project team to develop numerous innovative and collaborative solutions. Opened in October 2021, Climate Pledge Arena is home to the NHL’s newest franchise Seattle Kraken and WNBA’s Seattle Storm. The total transformation of the venue serves as a structural engineering benchmark for existing building renovations in high seismic zones and demonstrates what can be accomplished with modern design and analysis techniques.

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By John Worley, S.E. and Pierre Quenneville, Ph.D

“Residual drift” is the permanent lateral deformation of a building following an earthquake (Figure 1). In high seismic regions, buildings designed per code utilizing ductile seismic force resisting systems defined in ASCE 7 could experience excessive residual drifts in a major earthquake that may result in a damage level deemed to be uneconomical to retrofit and therefore be demolished.

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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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Dr. Nehemiah J. Mabry, P.E., is an engineer, educator, and CEO based in Raleigh, North Carolina. With advanced degrees in Mathematics and Civil/Structural Engineering, his career spans roles as a NASA Researcher, Bridge Design Engineer, and Professor. Dr. Mabry is also the CEO and Founder of STEMedia, an edtech and digital media company for young professionals in the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) community. He can be reached at nehemiah@stemedia.com.

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Located on Ford Island at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam in Hawaii, Building 26A was constructed in 1935 for an aviation storehouse and an airplane hangar for the Navy’s Fleet Air Base. The facility survived the December 7, 1941, surprise attack on Pearl Harbor (Figures 1 and 2) and in the 75 years since has undergone several changes in use. In 2014, the Navy elected to convert Building 26A into a new training facility for the Center for Security Forces (CENSECFOR).
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STRUCTURE magazine