Growing the Garden

By  Cawsie Jijina, P.E., and Stephen Reichwein, P.E

In a city of big numbers and big dreams, Madison Square Garden fits right in.
The busiest music venue in the country in terms of ticket sales (third-largest in the world behind Manchester Arena and London’s O2 Arena) and the home of the New York Knicks, New York Rangers and New York Liberty it has entertained countless spectators since its opening in 1968 and currently hosts more than 300 events per year.

Power of the Ring

The Forum in Inglewood, California (also known as the Fabulous Forum) is an arena with a cable-suspended structure – not unlike a suspension bridge. There are 40 columns positioned equally on a 404-foot diameter circle that taper into precast concrete arches which support the 70-foot high compression ring. Forty cables, each 3 inches in diameter, one from each column, are strung from these columns to a central tension ring. The entire roof structure sits on the cables. The inward force (pull) from the cables is countered by the giant compression ring, which, at the time it was designed, was the largest compression ring in America. In its original design, one hundred percent of the heavy lifting is done by the cables.

SEAoNY, The Awards Issue

On  a recent spring afternoon, I walked through midtown Manhattan enjoying the beautiful weather and admiring all of the impressive buildings that we structural engineers have designed. Reminded of my own start in New York and anticipating this awards issue of Cross Sections, it became an obvious opportunity to share a personal story that gets at the heart of what an organization like SEAoNY is about.

When I first moved to New York in 1990, fresh out of college, I had quite a different perspective than I do today. I was all dreams, desire, and confidence. Maybe I never articulated my ambitions clearly, but truthfully I wanted to literally be everything to the structural engineering profession. My goal was to design every building, draw every detail, obtain every commission, formulate every innovation, and attain every recognition.

Optimizing Light and Space in the Big City

At  eight stories high and comprised of reinforced concrete flat plate construction (concrete slab without beams), the residential building at 653 Tenth Avenue in New York City boasts distinct features that make this building more than the average ‘flat plate’. These include a column free corner with cantilevers of up to 20 feet long and a large amount of exposed reinforced concrete structure, both of which were achieved with a structural slab of no more than 8 inches thick on the interior of the space.

Theater on the Roof

Lincoln Center (LCT) in New York has long been associated with big productions. But it serves as a showcase for lesser-known artists as well, as indicated by LCT3, a program of scaled-down productions and emerging talent.

In searching for a permanent home for LCT3’s growing audience, the theater realized the need to expand its capacity within the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts (LCPA) campus and add a small, intimate theater to serve LCT3’s needs. (more…)

It Takes a Village

What is “SMART” Development?   There are several answers to that question, but perhaps one of the most intuitive ones is development that is centered around or in close proximity to mass transit. Such development is the goal of the New Jersey Department of Transportation’s Smart Growth initiative. In pursuing this goal for the town of New Brunswick, N.J., the New Brunswick Development Corp (DEVCO) created a mixed-use structure that would become a new epicenter for transit in the area, and in the process help revitalize the town center itself.  The project, the New Brunswick Gateway Transit Village (NBGTV), is a 632,000-sq.-ft, 300-ft-tall, mixed-use building that features parking, rental apartments, condominiums, office space and retail space.

New Brunswick Gateway Transit Village

By  J. Benjamin Alper, P.E., Cawsie Jijina, P.E., SECB and Fortunato Orlando, P.E.

The New Brunswick Gateway Transit Village (NBGTV) is situated adjacent to the commuter rail train station in New Brunswick, NJ. At 300+ feet tall, NBGTV is currently the tallest building in the city. The building consists of 632,000 square feet of mixed used space which includes parking, retail, office and residential uses. The podium structure of the building consists of a precast parking garage, with areas of concrete and metal deck on structural steel framing wrapping around the garage. Rising above the ten story podium is a fourteen story precast plank on structural steel framed residential tower. All of this is supported by deep continuous cast-in-place concrete footings.

Growing in Manhattan

Traders are already at work at Bank of America Tower at One Bryant Park, the new headquarters for Bank of America’s New York City operations, which will be completed in 2009. When the steel for the architectural spire topped out at 1,200 ft this past December, it completed the structural work for 2.1 million sq. ft of office space spread vertically over 55 stories. At the lower end of things, the new skyscraper also includes three cellar levels, an underground pedestrian passage, and a restored Broadway theater. To make all of this come together, an equally sizeable effort by the project team was needed, especially for the structural steel design. (more…)

Take Off at JFK and Newark International Airports

The steel framed parking garages constructed and planned by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey are a significant part of the multibillion dollar capital redevelopment programs at JFK International Airport in Queens, NY, and at Newark International Airport, NJ. The recently constructed 1,800 parking space Green Garage at JFK International Airport and the 3,300 parking space Lot E Garage under construction at Newark International Airport, designed and constructed by the Port Authority, meet the dramatic increases in passengers at the airports. (more…)