Last October, TFM‘s Managing Editor Anne Cosgrove wrote an article about the LEED Platinum upgrade for the Silver Spring, MD-based headquarters of the Discovery Channel. This past week, the building experienced yet another upgrade in honor of its “Shark Week” programming—the structure was transformed into a gigantic shark.
Here’s a link to a two minute video that explains how the building was transformed. And here are some interesting facts about “Chompie” (that’s the name of the shark), from the site, Discover Insider:
The inflatable shark consists of five pieces – the head, two side fins, a dorsal fin, and a tail. If the shark were real, it would be about 446 feet long from the tip of his nose to the back of his tail, about 113 feet tall from his belly to the top of his dorsal fin, and about 200 feet wide from tip to tip of his side fins — and he would weigh about 84,000 pounds. That’s one big shark!
The shark is a cold-air inflatable – it must be continuously inflated by air while it is installed on the building. It takes 10 air blowers blowing 2000 cubic feet per minute of air each to keep the five pieces inflated.
It took 11,720 yards of fabric to make the shark – that’s 6.65 miles of fabric! No to mention 36.7 miles of thread, and 3/4 of a mile of seatbelt webbing.
But with all of those windows blocked, does Chompie have an impact on the building’s energy improvement measures? Only the facility manager will know the answer to that question….
Chompie debuted back in 2007 in honor of the 20th anniversary of Shark Week. And while not entirely original (FacilityBlog covered a long standing shark building located in Oxford, England), it’s a great bit of publicity.