High Technology in construction
01 October 2005
When driving along the building site of FiftyTwoDegrees a few things catch the eye. You can see two concrete towers rapidly gaining height and we can see a steel construction rapidly being built around these towers which appears to be leaning.
The design of architect Mecanoo is as we know characterized by an office block that has a distinct leaning lower half, whilst the upper half is vertical as usual. The interesting thing is that we can now see how this is realized.
The two concrete towers serve as the usual core of the building, in which the elevators, staircases, and installation shafts find their place. For practical purposes these towers stand vertical. So the leaning lower half of the office block is formed by positioning each new steel floor construction in the lower half a bit more to one side around the two concrete towers. This evidently causes the steel columns in the elevations to lean.
The challenge for the builder Ballast Nedam is that during the assembly process not only the total mass of these steel floor constructions increases. During the assembly process the assembled total mass is positioned ever more to one side of the two concrete towers as well. This causes these constructions to deform to this side of the building. To prevent ending up with a leaning building as a whole, the construction parts are designed with a pre calculated deformation to the other side. This deformation will decrease and eventually will disappear during assembly.
