One Thousand Museum and ARO Win CTBUH Awards of Excellence For Best Tall Buildings

The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH) has recognized two high-rise structures designed by DeSimone Consulting Engineers as part of the 2020 Award of Excellence competition. The winning projects include Zaha Hadid’s iconic One Thousand Museum residential tower in Miami and ARO, a high-end rental development in Midtown, Manhattan designed by CetraRuddy.

The annual Award of Excellence program recognizes the world’s best tall buildings, urban contributions, emerging technologies, and innovative material use. As winners of the Best Tall Building category for structures standing 200-299 metres, One Thousand Museum and ARO will go on to compete in their respective “Best in Category” distinctions at the CTBUH 2020 Tall + Urban Innovation Conference that will take place April 5-7^th in Chicago, Illinois.

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Designed in collaboration by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Zaha Hadid, ODP Architects, and DeSimone Consulting Engineers, One Thousand Museum is an extraordinary example of Hadid’s distinct vision. The building’s undulating façade is comprised of Glass Fiber-Reinforced Concrete (GFRC) and functions as a structural exoskeleton that both carries the gravity loads of the tower and provides lateral stiffness to withstand high-velocity, hurricane wind forces. While exoskeletons are not new, they generally take rectilinear forms. By incorporating a permanent GFRC formwork system, the team was able to generate the tower’s unconventional and organic shapes. The 62-story, 709-foot tower was completed earlier this year.

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ARO at 242 West 53rd Street is a new 62-story building that comprises approximately 540,000 square feet. The building’s silhouette increasingly curves as the structure rises and is formed by a combination of shifting floor plates and balconies that extend from north and west-facing sides of the building on the 3rd floor and from all cardinal directions in the top half of the tower. DeSimone worked especially close with architect CetraRuddy to complete the tall, slender tower that stands 720 feet above ground and only 75 feet wide for an aspect ratio of 9.5:1.