What civil engineers are reading this week

• Brussels dual-tower project emphasizes sustainability while remaining flexible

  For the Tour & Taxis project in Brussels, MVRDV focused on a surprising design consideration – building weight – to cut embodied carbon and improve flexibility. How will the building evolve as the area changes?

• Community involvement essential for local decarbonization plans to work, researchers say

  Place-based decarbonization plans must involve local people earlier and consider the range of different community responses in development to succeed and gain fuller community support, a study finds.

• Florida highlights ‘flying car’ testing facility

  SunTrax Air Ground will be actively testing electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft by the end of this year, the governor says.

• Tesla wants to build a $10B solar factory in Texas

  The massive facility would be called Project Crystal Sun and would be 45 minutes southwest of Houston, according to documents filed with the state.

• Virginia commission orders utility to directly assign some transmission costs to data centers

  The Virginia State Corporation Commission said it may use an upcoming docket to weigh whether this policy “could or should” also apply to more upstream transmission costs.

• Majority of data centers are in urban, not rural, areas, according to a new report

  Researchers at New York University found that 97.5% of existing data centers sit in metro areas, counter to the industry narrative that most are in rural regions.