Gallery: Best Of What's New In Engineering, 2012

The greatest innovations in engineering from the seafloor to the tallest stone facade.

By PopSci Staff

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Grand Award Winner: Dockwise Vanguard

Courtesy Dockwise

When a battleship needs repairs in the middle of the ocean, a semisubmersible vessel like the Dockwise Vanguard can provide offshore dry dock. The 902-foot-long and 230-foot-wide bowless Vanguard—the largest craft of its kind by nearly a football field—can submerge its deck below the waterline and move its above-water towers aside, allowing mammoth marine vessels to float aboard before the Vanguard rides back up underneath them. The Vanguard can carry 121,254 tons of cargo and another 7,716 tons of food, fuel, and supplies; that’s almost double the payload of any such craft before it.

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Al Hamra Firdous Tower

Courtesy Al Hamra Firdous Tower

At 1,353 feet, the Al Hamra Firdous Tower in Kuwait is the tallest building in the world with one side made of stone. Before the advent of steel frames, which made glass curtain walls possible, masonry helped buildings stand tall. Instead of choosing stone for its strength, though, engineers and architects at SOM chose it to help keep the building cool. The tower’s monolithic facade faces south, where stone helps mitigate heat loading from the broiling sun. The rest of the building is covered entirely in glass, maximizing views across Kuwait City.

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6 Comments

11/27/12 at 1:13 am

Isn't the Burj Khalifa the tallest building in the world, by more than a thousand feet over Al Hamra Firdous Tower seems like a bit of an oversight since this website has published quite a few articles on it.

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TheZomb

11/27/12 at 1:15 am

On second examination it seems someone misread the wikipedia article which claims that the Al Hamra Tower is the tallest SCULPTED building in the world.

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C0nn0l2

11/27/12 at 6:59 pm

How am I going to correct you if you already corrected yourself?

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aussiebear97

11/28/12 at 1:30 pm

@ TheZomb if you re-read the entire sentence it says "...is the tallest building in the world WITH one side made of stone".

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riff_raff

11/28/12 at 10:32 pm

It seems a bit silly to put the Pixel building on this list of engineering achievements. Engineering is a field based on sound scientific principles, but the concept of "sustainability" is completely subjective. Sustainability completely ignores the primary, real-world considerations that most civil engineers must take into account with their designs, such as cost and profit.

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Boomshadow

12/09/12 at 7:56 pm

riff_raff, wrong. Sustainability can be objectively measured by how few resources the building consumes.