Archinect - News

Atkins joins NEOM as strategic partner for The Line project

2023-02-24T18:17:00-05:00

British engineering concern Atkins has been announced as a strategic Delivery Partner for The Line, Saudi Arabia’s complicated centerpiece for the NEOM megadevelopment that is set to be constructed in just under three years.

As part of their five-year contract, Atkins will provide project and construction consultancy services in unison with the project’s other, now-assumed partners that include Bechtel, Morphosis, and several leading international firms revealed last month via an exhibition in Riyadh.

In a press release, Atkins stated “[t]he project has adopted a highly collaborative delivery model in response to its scale, complexity, supply chain and requirements for innovation.”

Earlier on Archinect: The Line, the largest part of Saudi Arabia’s ambitious NEOM project, looks like a total fantasy

“As a Delivery Partner organization, we will work closely with NEOM and our partners to seamlessly connect people, data and technology to drive innovation, value, efficiency and certainty...

The world's 'deepest hotel' just opened to guests in an abandoned Chinese quarry

2018-11-16T15:50:00-05:00

Rising 88 metres (290 feet) from the floor of an abandoned quarry, the 18-storey InterContinental Shanghai Wonderland Hotel in the city’s Songjiang district has been in development for 12 years and cost 2 billion yuan (US$287.9 million) to complete. Of its 18 floors, just two are aboveground while its two lowest are completely submerged by a lake that occupies the remainder of the vast quarry pit.

Remember the Chinese 'Deep Pit Hotel' that was poised to open inside an abandoned quarry outside of Shanghai? Officially titled InterContinental Shanghai Wonderland, the 336-room luxury property finally launched yesterday.

'World's First Underground Hotel' set to open in an abandoned Chinese quarry

2018-09-28T18:29:00-04:00

InterContinental Shanghai Wonderland (also known as the Deep Pit Hotel), will finally open its doors in October. The eye-popping, luxury hotel is standing out as a must-see destination in itself. Built mostly below ground in a deep pit of an abandoned quarry in southwestern Shanghai, it’s being hailed as a modern architectural wonder. [...] Of its 18 floors, 16 are technically below ground, including two floors underwater.

Image courtesy of Atkins.

"The hotel houses 337 rooms and suites that boast curved balconies where guests can enjoy views of the waterfalls spilling from the surrounding cliffs and the transparent glass waterfall built into the centre of the hotel," writes Lonely Planet on its website. What's not to love?

Image courtesy of Atkins.

Artificial waterfalls inside an enormous rock pit certainly feel more authentic than the 350-foot example gushing down this skyscraper 1,130 miles further west in the city of Guiyang.

Work to begin on Dubai's second tallest (and world's fifth tallest) skyscraper

2018-03-19T14:52:00-04:00

Azizi Developments will begin work on what will become the world’s fifth tallest skyscraper in the third quarter of the year. Being developed at a cost of $816m (AED3bn) on Dubai's Sheikh Zayed Road, the 570-metre tall, 122-storey residential and commercial tower will house residential apartments on the first 100 floors, and a luxury hotel on the remaining 22. In an update, the Dubai-based developer said that it is currently consulting with Atkins to finalise the design based on its feedback.

It looks like there's new life in a flagship development on Dubai's Sheikh Zayed Road: after a previous proposal for the supertall Entisar Tower by AE7 with Meydan was sold to Azizi Developers, the company announced plans to work with global architectural firm Atkins on the designs and make the 570-meter plus project a reality within the next 39 to 44 months.

New UK train station got their math inspiration wrong

2017-06-12T17:14:00-04:00

Conway confirmed what several mathematicians have noticed since the station’s unveiling: the pattern on the façade follows the logic not of Conway’s Life but of Wolfram’s Rule 30, a different cellular automaton identified by the computer scientist Stephen Wolfram.

Atkins designed £50m Cambridge North railway station, a 4,843 sq ft building with three platforms and parking, opened this May.
Its aluminum façade was inspired by The Game of Life, a cellular automaton that a British mathematician John Horton Conway developed in 1970. Conway, nevertheless, claims that he does not recognize his work in the architecture of the station.

“That’s not mine,” the mathematician said of the pattern. “I have had an influence on Cambridge, but not apparently on the new railway station.”

As a 2015 Guardian profile of Conway put it, “the Game of Life demonstrates how simplicity generates complexity, providing an analogy for all of mathematics, and the entire universe."