Features
By Robert L. Reid
The Bloch Building—a 165,000 sq ft (15,000 m²) addition to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, in Kansas City, Missouri—and an adjoining underground parking garage feature a series of innovative T-shaped supports that underscore their unique structural and architectural design. Constructed alongside the existing museum, the slender, mostly underground Bloch Building won a design competition even though it broke the rules set forth in the competition guidelines.
By Patrick Treanor, P.E., and Val S. Frenkel, Ph.D., P.E., D.WRE, M.ASCE
Desalination offers a means of relieving some of the burden that falls heavily on freshwater ecosystems as sources of water for residential, commercial, and industrial needs. However, careful analysis is required to ensure that discharges of concentrated brine from desalination facilities are handled in such a way as to minimize untoward effects on the environment. Different factors must be considered on the basis of whether a facility will discharge to a bay or an ocean.
By Darryl Matson, P.E., P.Eng., Karsten Veng, Eduardo Pradilla, P.Eng., M.ASCE, and Keith Kirkwood, P.Eng.
Some elements of a well-built but older floating bridge in British Columbia were included in a replacement structure, but a new, high-level section designed to enable boats to pass beneath presented challenges. The designers had to contend with significant vertical, horizontal, and rolling motions on the floating pontoon portion of the new bridge and at the transitions to the fixed roadways.
By Gerald L. DeMers, P.E., M.ASCE
Engineers were hired to close a silica gel landfill that might—or might not—become the base for a second landfill above it. The solution required the creation of a mound of fill that would settle as the soft materials below became compacted, along with a robust drainage system that would prevent problems regardless of the eventual outcome.
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