Student thesis projects

The Ministry of Heritage and Culture (MoHC) of the sultanate of Oman had the ambition to construct a large cultural centre in Muscat and transform it into a meeting place and true urban centre of the city.

Service area – a reinforced – concrete structure featuring three funnel – shaped columns that support a melded trio of curvy horizontal discs.

The freeform architectural design made it a challenge to use traditional structural analysis software on that project. With SCIA Engineer, KPFF were able import and reuse the architectural model, derive an analysis model, and the automatic meshing capabilities provided a mesh that was clean.

This project is about one of the largest stages ever toured in any field of entertainment. The structure’s central grid is raised 28 metres high, with legs traversing the width of a soccer pitch.

The size and complexity of the museum made it a very special challenge to design the different sub-structures: the base, the cloud and the crystal. Load panels were used to apply the wind tunnel loads and the “absences” tool proved quite useful. The full model contains 27,000 nodes, 32,000 beams and 7,000 load panels.

This project comprises two adjoining office buildings in the shape of a butterfly. The site is located on the left side of the Dambovita River.