The construction crew over at One Thousand Museum, starchitect Zaha Hadid‘s Museum Park-adjacent ultra luxury condo tower, are adding a new floor every couple of weeks, and the building’s rather distinctive form has begun to take shape. Sure it’s a form that has been compared to everything from the awe-inspired, to the benign, and to the unprintable, but the design is really quite innovative.
One Thousand Museum’s prefabricated exoskeleton is being shipped over from Dubai in 4,800 pieces, allegedly saving months in construction, as well as completely opening up floor plates by removing interior load-bearing columns while still preserving expansive exterior glass walls.
According to an article last year on Gizmodo, the exoskeleton was originally designed to be purely cosmetic, but evolved into the essential structural form it is, literally holding up the building from the outside. “DeSimone [the building’s structural engineer] figured out a way to make that decorative exoskeleton part of the building’s structural engineering. They’re made out of hollow precast panels (produced in Dubai) that are then filled with cement when they’re installed. It actually is an exoskeleton, just [as] Hadid’s design implied from the beginning.” The 706 foot tower will have 83 units, with no more than two per floor, and plenty of very extravagant amenities like a rooftop aquatic center and custom interior scenting for the public spaces, also designed by Zaha.
