Date/Time
Date(s) - July 14, 2016
6:30 pm - 9:00 pm

Location
Posh Network Centre

Categories No Categories

Image courtesy of Zaha Hadid Architects

The second event in the AIA HK Advanced Technology series will feature several speakers on Zaha Hadid Architects’ City of Dreams Hotel Tower in Macau.  The challenges of one of the world’s most complex buildings and façade systems will be presented from three perspectives: that of the architect, the engineer and the façade production consultant.

This event will offer a rare opportunity to hear about the role of advanced computational technology from design to analysis to fabrication and construction.  Project leaders from Zaha Hadid Architects, Buro Happold and Front Inc. will present their strategies for undertaking this remarkable project, due to open in 2017.

Melco Crown Entertainment is the developer and owner of the fifth hotel tower at City of Dreams, the company’s flagship property in Cotai, Macau.  With 40 floors and a gross floor area of 150,000 square metres, the tower houses approximately 780 guestrooms, suites and sky villas. The hotel also includes a variety of meeting and event facilities, gaming rooms, lobby atrium, restaurants, spa, and sky pool. Including extensive back of house areas and supporting ancillary facilities, the tower’s design resolves the hotel’s many complex programs within a single cohesive envelope.
The design combines dramatic public spaces and generously sized guest rooms with innovative engineering and formal cohesion. The rectangular outline of the site is extruded as a monolithic block with a series of voids which carve through the centre of the tower, merging traditional architectural elements of roof, wall and ceiling to create a sculptural form that defines many of the hotel’s internal public spaces.
The tower’s exposed exoskeleton reinforces the dynamism of the design. Expressive and powerful, the external structure optimises the interior layouts and envelops the building, further defining its formal composition and establishing relationships with the new Cotai Strip.

http://www.zaha-hadid.com/architecture/city-of-dreams-hotel-tower-cotai-macau/

EVENT SPEAKERS

Zaha Hadid Architects
Viviana Muscettola, Senior Associate

Viviana joined Zaha Hadid Architects in 2004, having first worked for a number of different practices in China, the Netherlands, and Italy. An Associate since 2009 and a Senior Associate since 2014, she has worked on a wide range of the firm’s projects, and competitions, in Malaysia, China, Egypt, Singapore, France, and the UK, including winning competitions for the Glasgow Riverside Museum, the CMA CGM Head Office Tower in Marseille and the Architecture Foundation, London. As project director, Viviana has led a number of major projects for the practice, including the D’Leedon residential development in Singapore, which was completed in 2014, a masterplan for the Cairo Expo City’s exhibition and conference centre in Egypt (unbuilt), and a mixed-use development in Beijing featuring a luxury department store, entertainment complex, and apartments (currently on site).
Viviana is the project director for the 780 keys hotel and casino in  Macau, having followed the design from the initial concept to the current construction phase .
Viviana began her architecture studies at the University of Naples, receiving her degree, and the prize for best thesis project in architecture, in 2001 . She continued her studies at the Architectural Association’s Design Research Laboratory, receiving her Masters Degree in 2004.

Michele Salvi, Lead Architect

Since joining ZHA in 2004, Michele has been involved in a number of projects, including successful competition designs for a Museum in Cagliari (2006) and the Regium Waterfront masterplan and Museum in Reggio Calabria (2007). He has worked in both the ZHA London and Rome offices and is a registered architect in the UK (ARB) and Italy (OdAR). Michele is currently the facade project architect on Macau’s COD Hotel D, a 160m tall, 150,000sqm tower – including casino facilities. On this project, fully generated, rationalized and further developed by parametric tools, he has coordinated the development of a complex façade system featuring free-form, triangulated glazing and an exoskeleton cladding in doubly-curved aluminium panels. The project is currently on site and Michele is leading the ZHA team coordinating the design development with contractors.
Michele studied architecture at Università degli studi di Firenze, Italy, and graduated cum laude in 2003.

Buro Happold
Emidio Piermarini, Project Engineer

Emidio Piermarini is a structural engineer with Buro Happold Engineering.  A graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), he has been involved with complex projects in the Middle East and Asia for the past three years and is a specialist in the field of parametric design and the technologies used to create high performance structures such as the Hotel D at City of Dreams – which incorporates one of the most complicated structural exoskeletons ever constructed.  Emidio was a primary member of the project design team and will discuss the technical aspects of the solution employed to deliver hundreds of geometrically complicated connections against a fast-track programme.

Front Inc.
Ramon van der Heijden

Ramon van der Heijden studied Architecture as well as Design and Decision Support Systems at Eindhoven University of Technology. He has worked as an architect at UNStudio Amsterdam and is currently a computational design specialist at Front Inc. in New York and Hong Kong. Specializing in the generation of large, data rich building models has enabled him to author the Elefront add-in for Grasshopper, as well as to host numerous workshops in the professional and academic world. Ramon has taught computational design at Eindhoven University of Technology, and Construction Communication and Architectural Design at HKU. He has also hosted seminars on Elefront at Chinese University Hong Kong, Hong Kong University and for the AA Visiting School, Hong Kong. Ramon currently leads the practical research initiative Volatile Data Mining that pushes the boundaries of data processing in architecture and construction using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles to acquire real world data.

Evan Levelle

As an Associate in Front’s Hong Kong office, Evan has collaborated with leading architects on a wide range of international projects ranging from single family residences to cultural institutions, art galleries, large commercial institutions and high-rise buildings. He received a Bachelor of Science in Architecture degree from the Georgia Institute of Technology and has a strong computational background with a commitment to the process of ‘making’. Levelle is focused, in particular, on bringing his knowledge of computational design, fabrication methodologies, and material sourcing to deliver complex projects around the world.

Special Thanks to

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