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October 2007
Dear Colleagues:

This will be the last Newsletter before our Awards Dinner and our Steering Group Meeting which will happen on October 25th, 2007. I look forward to seeing many of you at the Awards Dinner. This year, our awards go to Lord Foster and Dr Farzard Naiem for lifetime achievement; the Beetham Hilton Tower for the Best Building Award and the Hearst Tower for the Best Sustainable Building and we will also celebrate the appointment of the Council's new fellows; Les Robertson and Chandra Ja.
The Awards dinner will coincide with the Council's Annual Steering Group meeting. Our Steering Group will travel from all around the world to meet in Chicago to discuss the direction of the Council and our progress against the 5-year plan, as well as our plans for the coming year. So now is the opportunity for our members to review where we are and what we are doing and give their feedback and opinions. These can be sent to me at the email address below or to any of the Steering Group members. All comments, observations and suggestions will be presented to the Steering Group.
It is difficult to summarize our achievements this year as we have made great progress on many fronts. However I am most pleased to report that our membership continues to grow rapidly. While I like to believe that this is a reflection of our success at being an international organizations that unifies the building industry on an international scale, it is perhaps also a reflection of the growth of the urban environment. The world has now reached the stage where 50% of the population live in an urban rather than a rural environment, and the result is that the world's building industry is increasingly focussed on tall buildings. The Council is a key organization to disseminate best practice across the world and we will continue to work with our members and similar organizations, like the World Green Building Council, to help influence building practice in a positive way. The Council's high profile continues to grow around the world, and we are looking at a program of expansion to reflect this increase in support from our membership. In the past we have helped establish the Dutch CTBUH and the Australian CTBUH and we are now in discussion with several countries to establish more local organizations.
Antony Wood has settled into his role as Executive Director and is making a great difference to our whole organization. In this last year we have had great success in the development of our web site, which now includes several hundred technical papers. We are now developing the next phase of the web site and expect this to be released shortly. We are building a system that will become a true resource for our membership. Similarly under Natalie Brush's direction the Newsletter has improved tremendously as you can see. It is now a very effective document that summarizes what is happening in the Council and in the world of tall buildings in general.
As the world high rise construction market continues to grow and continues to move towards a cohesive international market, the Council will continue to grow. We have made much progress, but there is much more to do. In particular we need more research and more effort to deal with the technical issues and sustainable challenges that face the building industry. Too much of our design work is based on tradition, rather than science and we will examine our approach to technical issues at our Steering Group Meeting.
Do not forget to register for our 8th World Congress in Dubai, 2008; details can be found on our web site. This will be a great conference and we have received many excellent papers on a wide range of subjects, and we expect to have a spectacular line-up of speakers. This will be the key gathering of the Council from the last 3 years and I look forward to seeing many of you there.
Sincerely,
David Scott
Chairman, CTBUH
Principal, Arup
dscott@ctbuh.org
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