Summary
Leading British engineering design and consulting firm Arup has won the 40th annual MacRobert Award, the UK's biggest prize for engineering innovation. The Duke of Edinburgh presented the team with a pounds 50,000 prize and the solid gold MacRobert Award medal at the Academy Awards Dinner on June 9. The Award was given for Arup's visionary Beijing Aquatic Centre, the Water Cube, and the setting for the phenomenal swimming events at last summer's Olympic Games. The team made revolutionary use of virtual prototyping, which is changing the way the building industry approach new projects.
The Water Cube, now providing a legacy as an extensive integrated water sports venue, contains leisure, training and competition centres. Conceptually, it is a greenhouse made from a lightweight structure based on the geometry of soap bubbles and clad in a space- age plastic material called ETFE.See the full content of this document
Extract
Water Cube Makes a Big Splash for Arup
With 22,000 pieces and 12,000 joints, the polyhedral space frame is extremely energy-efficient and possibly the most earthquake- resistant building built to date.
Setting new benchmarks for environmental impact and resource consumption, the building incurs minimal operating costs. It captures 20% of the i...See the full content of this document
Sponsored links
