Avant-garde construction projects, what's next?

By Ben Freund

Office parks, municipal projects, and apartment buildings are the standard stock-in-trade for the construction industry, but they aren’t the limit of what ambitious and inspired developers can accomplish. Today, we’re taking a look at some of the most amazing modern construction projects around the world.

1. The Water Discus Hotel

If you’re talking ambitious construction projects, it’s hard not to mention Dubai, sometimes called the “crane capital of the world” due to the scale and variety of development constantly underway in the UAE super-city. The global economic crisis threw many of those projects into crisis, but so much money flows through the city that others have risen to take their place. Did we say risen? “Sunk” might be more appropriate.

The Water Discus Hotel’s underwater portion is intended to accommodate 21 underwater rooms at 33 feet below the surface of the ocean. The entire structure could up its support pillars and move should relocation ever be necessary, and in the event of emergency the aquatic disc could surface in as little as fifteen minutes and the above-water discs would be buoyant and detachable, allowing them to act as lifeboats. And the builders? For an aquatic complex like this, construction would be handled by Dubai-area shipyard Drydocks World.

This isn’t the first proposed underwater hotel, but it would be the first to be finished if it avoids the fate of other projects such as the Poseidon Resort in Fiji which has suspended construction, and Hydropolis, another Dubai-based project that never moved past the blueprint stage. Whether the Water Discus is finally built or not, the sudden increase in marine development projects in the last few years suggests they will become a reality soon. The hotel’s design firm, Deep Ocean Technology, is counting on it.

2. The IceCube Observatory

From the desert paradise of Dubai, we take you to the frozen wastes of the South Pole, where construction finished last year on the IceCube observatory, the largest neutrino telescope in the world. We’ll spare you the worst of the science jargon, but suffice to say that a neutrino telescope doesn’t observe the far reaches of space. Instead, it looks for elusive sub-atomic particles, which are almost impossible to detect except under ideal conditions. In this case, the ideal conditions are found in the pure, crystal-clear ice buried more than a mile beneath the arctic surface.

The project required the boring of more than eighty 1.5-mile deep holes, not with diamond-tipped augers but with a specially developed device called the Enhanced Hot Water Drill capable of drilling through two kilometers of ice in under two days. That new technology allowed for the placement of over 5,000 sensors, after which the holes were refrozen. Construction took place over the course of seven years, but only from November to February, when the arctic “summer” provided 24-hour sunlight for 24-hour drilling. The total area excavated would be large enough to fit over 1,000 football fields.

The complete observatory cost over $279 million to construct with the cooperation of universities from around the world. And if that sounds like a high price to pay for the advancement of science, it’s chump change compared to…

3. The ITER Fusion Reactor

The ITER, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, being constructed in Cadarache, France, at a cost of over 15 billion euros, will operate on the principle of nuclear fusion, a process that literally powers the sun itself. Most reactors operate on the principle of nuclear fission (atom splitting).

The ITER project was conceived in 1985, funded in 2006, began construction in 2007, and is scheduled to be ready for operation by 2020. Even by then, the facility will be conducting initial experiments rather than producing power. More than 500 workers contributed to the project in 2011, and that number is expected to increase to 3,000 in 2014. Those workers will assemble over one million parts sourced from factories around the world. At the core of this colossal installation will be a structure called a “tokamak” designed to magnetically suspend the reactive material in midair, as the superheated plasma would destroy any surface it came into contact with.

Futureshock Therapy

To offset all this news about cutting-edge construction projects, we close with a prehistoric tidbit: Just last week, workers at San Francisco’s Transbay Terminal found a fossilized mammoth tooth while digging a hole for a piling. There’s an opportunity for the unexpected at any construction site, even if your next project isn’t a mobile underwater luxury hotel.

This is a guest post by Ben Freund on behalf of Airking Fastening Systems, an industry leading ecommerce site selling roofing nailers. He writes tips, tutorials, and more on the Airking Blog. Follow on Facebook@AirKingFasteningSystems.

http://constructioninformer.com/2012/09/21/modern-marvels-todays-wildest-construction-projects/