- 5 months ago
Apartments hanging 164 feet above the water defy gravity in Amsterdam. Three rippling towers with the 83rd story left open to prevent it swaying transform Chicago's skyline. And Paris's Pompidou Centre reinvents museums.
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00:01How do you construct an apartment building in the middle of a lake that looks as though it's suspended in midair?
00:08There was this moment where the two sides would kiss.
00:12That was a moment I will never forget.
00:16How do you stop a 101-story skyscraper from swaying in the Windy City, where Gus reached 80 miles an hour?
00:25It truly is a super-tall structure, and it pushed us in places that we weren't used to being pushed.
00:32And how do two upstart architects create an international icon that changes the world?
00:38When we saw this competition, we said, let's make a bit of drama.
00:44Welcome to a world where anything is possible.
00:49The space where innovation and creativity collide.
00:55This isn't just impressive, it's revolutionary.
00:58Where the only limit is human imagination.
01:02This wasn't just ambitious, it was audacious.
01:06No one had ever attempted anything like it.
01:11Unpacking the miracles and mysteries of construction.
01:16Sometimes buildings can change the world, and this is one of them.
01:21To ask, how did they build that?
01:28With a third of the country below sea level, and the rest just typically 36 feet above it,
01:37good building land in the Netherlands is scarce.
01:40Luckily, though, they are rich in gifted humans capable of architectural miracles.
01:46Architects so clever that while they might not be able to walk on water,
01:50what they can do is build incredible houses on it.
01:53It's the late 20th century, and Amsterdam is booming.
02:03The population has just hit 1 million people, and the city needs more homes.
02:08But there's a problem.
02:10Believe it or not, almost the entire city of Amsterdam was literally pulled out of the water.
02:15Those iconic canals and those charming streets were built from scratch over hundreds of years
02:21with brilliant engineering.
02:23But now, the city's run out of room.
02:25So what do they do?
02:27They decide to create a suburb by building six new islands and 20,000 homes on Lake Eymere.
02:34The water has always been an important ingredient of the city of Amsterdam.
02:38We don't fight against the water, but we have learned to work with water.
02:42By 2011, the islands and houses are underway, but it's lacking a certain something special.
02:50They were really looking at making it possible to have a new landmark at that side of the city of Amsterdam.
02:57Not only did they want an icon, they wanted an apartment block that fostered incredible community spirit.
03:04Local firm Barcode and Danish company, the Bjarke Ingels Group, team up to nail the brief.
03:14If you see the building from above, it really looks like a completely classic square block.
03:20But when you see it from the sides, you realize that it's lifted up to the north,
03:24allowing boats and paddle boards and kayaks to sail all the way into the courtyard.
03:29And the courtyard effectively becomes a marina.
03:33It's an extraordinary idea and a million miles from the norm.
03:38If you take kind of the traditional courtyard block, there you have kind of the public outside and the private inside.
03:45And here we kind of completely turned that thing around.
03:47And that, in combination with the water, allowed for a super public experience inside out.
03:55Known as Slaus House, this 442-unit apartment building will rise from the water,
04:01while its terraces seem to tumble down to the public marina below.
04:07Building it will mean overcoming some daunting hurdles.
04:10First, they'll have to anchor the structure to the lake bed.
04:16Then, they'll need to hold back the water so they can actually build it.
04:20Next, they'll have to create an extraordinary shape without the whole building tipping forward.
04:25And finally, release the water to surround the building without flooding it.
04:30When it's completed, Amsterdam will have a new apartment building and a stunning new landmark.
04:36Now, we really have to come through and see if it's actually possible, what we imagined.
04:45When work begins in December 2018, they have to build the foundation while contending with water.
04:54Lots of water.
04:56First of all, to carry the building, you need to drive piles deep into the mud and the sand.
05:02For a building like this, you want a really good bedrock, good sand layers to drive your piles in.
05:09And those were, unfortunately, really deep.
05:12And when he says really deep, he is not kidding.
05:16200 feet deep.
05:18That's actually deeper than the foundations of a typical skyscraper.
05:22And the kicker is, this was for a building that was only 11 stories tall.
05:27To hold up a building of this size, they needed to drive 923 of these concrete piles from above the water down into the lake bed.
05:41Building on the water is obviously like a major challenge.
05:45We made piles from floating pontons in the water.
05:50This was something we'd never done before.
05:51It takes six months, but finally, the last pile goes in.
06:04Now, they need to create dry land so they can build on top of the piles.
06:10You build a cofferdam, which basically means you put down a perimeter.
06:13So we create a sheet piling around the building pit.
06:18And we make it watertight by welding all the slots of the sheet piling.
06:23And then you drain all the seawater and you expose the seabed.
06:28With the cofferdam built and the water emptied, the team brings in 28 tons of steel and concrete to create the basement and parking garages, which will be below water level.
06:45Then, in March 2020, as they're about to start building up, Mother Nature strikes.
06:53Bringing with her unprecedented high water levels.
06:58I got the call from our construction company.
07:05The whole parking garage was flooded.
07:12I was like, oh gosh, how are we going to resolve this?
07:16It wasn't a good day.
07:27We need to call the fire department to help us out.
07:31And it was a couple of days of pumping all of the water back out in the lake to make our spot dry again.
07:37In June 2020, the team prepares to start work on the main apartment building, which will extend 164 feet out over the water.
07:54Hopefully.
07:54And the shape of the building basically wants to tip over.
07:59It's down to the team to stop it from doing exactly that.
08:04They have load-bearing walls and they have load-bearing corridors.
08:08It's almost just that you step one step out every time.
08:11Now, they just have to build them, making sure the two sides meet perfectly in the middle.
08:19You build it almost like a bridge.
08:22So you have to make sure that you actually meet into this single point.
08:26So that was quite nerve-wracking, let's say.
08:28To make things even trickier, the soil on one side is composed of softer sand.
08:35So when the building settles, that side will drop more.
08:39So we try to build it a bit more upwards.
08:42So once it settles, they would end at the same level.
08:45We did a lot of survey, a lot of double-checking the survey.
08:49It's essential they get their calculations right.
08:52The buildings have to settle to within three-quarters of an inch of one another.
08:57We were actually quite nervous about how the building would behave during construction
09:02if they would actually meet together at the same spot.
09:05If we made it uneven, then that would set us back months, even years.
09:19After two years of construction, the team prepares to put in the 11th and final floor.
09:27There was this moment where the two sides would kiss.
09:36In March 2021, the moment arrives.
09:41We expected 20 millimeters differences, but then in practice, it actually went better than we expected.
09:49So there was only a difference of 10 millimeters.
09:52It was total relief for all of the project team.
09:55With less than half of an inch difference between the two sides, the team turns to finishing the building.
10:01Which includes fitting 42 high-performance windows that are wind- and watertight, and strong enough to walk on, allowing you to look out onto the water below.
10:14And wrapping the exterior in 170 tons of marine-grade aluminum tiles.
10:19With that complete, the team has one final hurdle, letting the water back in.
10:26That's the moment when you see if your building is watertight.
10:29In the Netherlands, the construction team is ready to open the dam that has been holding back the waters of Lake Eymere.
10:40From around the Slous House apartment building.
10:42We start letting water in on a Friday afternoon.
10:48Although they had applied a thick liquid membrane to waterproof the building, you don't know if it's worked until you test it.
10:58We were a bit nervous on the water tightness of the building.
11:02Any problems will set back the schedule by months.
11:06When we came back on Monday, all the land was gone, and then right back on the water.
11:15And we didn't flood in the basement, so that was also a good sign.
11:20That was a moment I will never forget.
11:23It was the way it turned out, the way the water came into the building.
11:27It was perfect.
11:29On June 28th, 2022, after four years of construction,
11:34the dramatic Slous House rises from the water.
11:44I'm really sure there's no view like it in the whole Amsterdam, in the whole Netherlands.
11:49When you look around, you can see Amsterdam, or on the other side, you can see the water.
11:55It's magnificent.
11:58And also from every corner, you see it in totally different shape,
12:01and every light is giving a different look.
12:04It's really amazing, and I'm so lucky to live here.
12:08The private terraces for residents, and the steps that the public can use,
12:13cascade down to the stunning courtyard and marina.
12:17Elegantly, bringing the community together.
12:23I would love to have an apartment.
12:25It's a really special place there.
12:27We would really be able to look down under the waters.
12:29It's a very special project, and I had a lot of fun working on it, so really good to look back on.
12:38Whether you're a resident or just visiting, you come to enjoy the views, go boating, or go swimming.
12:44It's a super smart design that creates an amazing sense of community.
12:49We are very proud to be able to contribute to Amsterdam with this building,
12:54and I hope the people in the neighborhood, but also in the city,
12:58have this kind of same sense of pride when they look at this.
13:02The magic of This Life's House is that it's not private, it's not public, it's communal.
13:21Figuring out how to build a three-towered luxury hotel over a busy road in Chicago?
13:25That's easy, but designing a 101-story, 1,200-foot-tall hotel in the Windy City?
13:31That's a different kind of breeze.
13:33To keep the wind from wreaking havoc, architects got creative by giving it the VIP treatment.
13:38Unlike other guests, they didn't give it a nice room or even a suite.
13:42They left an entire floor completely empty, just so the wind could blow through.
13:46In Chicago, extraordinary architecture has broken the mold time and time again.
13:59I think the true passion of this city lies in our ability to provide a world-class skyline
14:04and maintain that world-class skyline.
14:08America's first skyscraper was built here in 1885.
14:12And since then, architectural A-listers from Frank Lloyd Wright to Mies Vandero have left their mark on the city.
14:22Architecture is very important to the city of Chicago.
14:25It's really part of the fabric of the city.
14:27So there's a lot of interest any time a new structure is built, particularly a super-tall structure.
14:33So when developer Sean Lanay decides to build on a prime waterfront plot,
14:38he wants something extraordinary to fill it.
14:42We're right at the corner of where the Chicago River meets Lake Michigan.
14:47It is such a high-profile site that it needed to be something really special.
14:51He brings in an architect he likes and respects.
14:55Someone who knows Chicago well.
14:57World-famous Jeannie Gang.
14:59Well, I've always thought of Chicago as a place where all the tall buildings are in a kind of dialogue with each other.
15:08So I kind of approached it like, you know, I'm a new kid on the block and seeing what I have in common with the other ones.
15:16The St. Regis Tower was really deserving of something special.
15:19And that's really what the challenge to Jeannie was.
15:22Jeannie, we need you to create some cachet for this building.
15:26Something that will resonate with the buyers and make them inclined to spend as much money as they're going to have to spend to live in this building.
15:34To do that, she's going to need to throw out the rule book.
15:38Most skyscrapers stick to the same basic formula.
15:44You have vertical cores, stacked floors, and a glass facade because it works.
15:52But Jeannie wanted to reinvent the type.
15:56So how do you take those familiar pieces and twist them into something new?
16:03Not only that, Jeannie Gang's facing one of the most complicated sites.
16:08In the city, set between Lakeshore East Park and the Chicago River, it has a road running right through the middle of it.
16:17And so that led me to thinking of breaking the building into three separate elements, vertical elements,
16:23where we could raise and lower the base so people can go from the park to the river.
16:29Gang's idea is to take a solid building and create the illusion of three interlocking towers.
16:41But that will bring with it a unique set of problems.
16:50The first job will be to make room for the road that runs through the middle of the building.
16:57But having lifted the middle tower up, they've somehow got to make sure the rest of the building stays up too.
17:03Then, Gang wants the towers to ripple and mirror like the neighboring Lake Michigan.
17:11All while making sure the almost 1,200-foot-tall structure doesn't sway too much in the Windy City.
17:21So we've done a lot of buildings in our relatively short history of our company.
17:25St. Regis Tower is by far the tallest.
17:28It truly is a super-tall structure.
17:30And it pushed us in places that we weren't used to being pushed.
17:33In September 2016, work begins on the massive concrete foundations.
17:43In Chicago, we like to think that we pour concrete faster than anybody in the world.
17:48Time is really money when it comes to a construction schedule.
17:52And a project of this scale involves a huge concrete pour.
17:57So the building is very tall and very heavy.
18:01And to support such heavy loads requires special foundations.
18:05These were like 100-foot-tall columns, some of them as big as 10 foot in diameter.
18:10By March 2017, they're ready to get out of the ground and start building the towers.
18:17But there's a complication.
18:19So we have three stems, a 100-story stem, a 75-story stem, and a 50-story stem.
18:24Normally, each would have its own central core to hold it up.
18:28That 75-story middle mass of the building, at the base, this is where the drive-through underneath the building passes through.
18:37So we can't have a core going through it.
18:41Stage one is to share two cores between the three towers.
18:45We have a 50-story core and a 100-story core stabilizing the sides of the building.
18:52But on their own, they're not going to be enough.
18:55So stage two is what the engineers hope will be a brilliant solution.
19:00There's a spine wall that connects to the east and west core and actually structurally locks the two together.
19:06If you looked at just this wall between the cores, it's close to 300 feet tall.
19:11It's about 100 foot wide.
19:14The success of this entire project rests on this wall holding up the 1,200-foot-tall tower.
19:21That was a big challenge.
19:22We had not built something like this before.
19:27In Chicago, work has started on the huge concrete wall,
19:31which will allow the middle tower of the St. Regis to float over the road.
19:37But regular old concrete isn't up to the job.
19:41Not only do they require a strength requirement,
19:43they also required a stiffness requirement, far beyond what's normally required.
19:47Not all concrete is created equal.
19:50Different ratios of cement, water, aggregate, or rocks
19:55produce different strengths and stiffnesses,
19:59all depending on how you mix them and how long they set for.
20:04So we were creating a high-performance concrete mix
20:07that was going to be able to give us the necessary strength as well as the stiffness.
20:13By October 2017, the building is beginning to take shape.
20:19The general concept was to basically push the cores up and then build the floors,
20:25connect the floors to the already constructed core.
20:28So the cores were always going up ahead, followed by the floor construction.
20:33When it's finished, St. Regis will be huge,
20:36almost 1,200 feet high at the tallest tower.
20:41But for architect Jeannie Gang, it's essential not to overpower the skyline.
20:48For me, tall buildings are not about how tall they are.
20:51It's about, like, how good the architecture is and what it does for the city.
20:54Inspired by nature, Gang's buildings, like Chicago's Aqua Tower,
20:59have been softened by the curves of hills, valleys, and pools.
21:05I'm a lifelong student of natural forces and natural things.
21:12For St. Regis, she turns to something much, much smaller.
21:18This tower was really kind of came out of a shape that she found in nature,
21:23which is a frustum.
21:24A frustum is essentially a pyramid with a top locked off.
21:28It's gemstones.
21:29What I did with this building is, like, start with this kind of smaller module
21:34and then add it together, you know, flipping it
21:38and finding ways that this geometry could interlock.
21:44Curd buildings bring organic forms to a skyline.
21:48They're a clever way to bring movement to a cityscape,
21:51which makes it feel more inviting and less imposing.
21:54But to pull off the organic shape is going to take some serious engineering.
22:02Each of the three stems at its narrowest is 85 feet,
22:06at its widest is 95 feet.
22:07And it comes in and out about every 13 stories.
22:11With the floors regularly increasing and then decreasing in size,
22:15the challenge is how to stack them on top of each other
22:19so the building's weight is directed down into its base.
22:24In typical high-rises, floors are built the same size
22:28so that the structural walls are placed directly above each other
22:33and transferring the building's load vertically down to the foundations.
22:38But that system doesn't work well
22:41when floors are continually increasing or decreasing in size.
22:47Picture weight like electricity.
22:49Columns are your copper wires.
22:51Slide a column on one floor out of line with the one below
22:55and the circuit breaks.
22:58The current backs up, stress spikes, and there's going to be damage.
23:02The engineers come up with a simple but effective solution.
23:07So what we did is at every floor, we stepped the columns out
23:11about four to five inches.
23:14We simply oversize the columns by four inches
23:18and each one stacks on top of the one below it with a slight offset.
23:23As the floors go up, the next challenge is creating a facade
23:26that emphasizes the changing shapes of each of the three towers.
23:32Jeannie's idea was to use different gradients of glass
23:36or six different gradients of glass to kind of accentuate this movement.
23:40For every 12 floors, we have a variety of glass colors
23:45that goes from darker, you know, greenish-blue to lighter.
23:50But standard tinting won't work on a building this big
23:53and with such a complicated color scheme.
23:57The thing about glass is not all glass is made the same.
24:02Glass achieves its different colors and tints
24:06through different assemblies.
24:09You can coat the glass with a film, but over time, this can crack.
24:15Or you can add metal oxides as the glass is made.
24:20Different metals produce different colors.
24:24But it's difficult to get the exact shades needed consistently.
24:29The problem with that is it makes the glass look different
24:33in different kinds of light.
24:34And we didn't want the glass to look different.
24:36We just wanted the color to look different.
24:38The solution lies 4,000 miles away at a specialist German glassmaker.
24:46Here, a pioneering technique produces colored glass consistently at scale.
24:51This is the first project that really did this.
24:57It's a coating process for the glass that is very precise.
25:02This glass remains the same color regardless of the angle you look at it from.
25:08So that was really exciting to innovate on that level.
25:14While the glass is created, the team building the three towers faces its next challenge.
25:22When you get a column that's 1,200 feet tall and you put load on it, it will shorten by a number of inches.
25:29Now, it's not such a challenge when the whole building is the same height, but when you have a part that's 100 stories that wants to shorten more, a 75-story piece in between that shortens a little less, and a 50-story portion that shortens even less, that needs to be programmed into the design and in particular into the construction.
25:47It's essential.
25:49The towers settle to the exact same place, so the floors match up.
25:56So the columns are made on the order of like, you know, half inch or three-quarters of inch, like, you know, higher than where they're supposed to be.
26:02But the floor below them is also a little bit taller.
26:04And then you end up with the floors sloping outwards and upwards.
26:09And then as the load comes down, they basically gradually creep down into a level condition.
26:15One by one, the towers climb to their limit, with the West Tower reaching its full height of almost 1,200 feet and bringing with it a new challenge.
26:28The higher you go, the windier it is up there.
26:34In Chicago, the construction team behind the super-tall St. Regis Tower needs to find a way to stop its swaying,
26:43especially as gusts in the windy city can exceed 80 miles per hour.
26:51So that the person up at the highest floors in the building, as they're sitting down with a glass of wine,
26:57they're not seeing a slosh in the wine or the chandelier or the window drapings clicking against the window.
27:04For the 1,200-foot tower, they turn to a tried-and-true method.
27:09We have a linear, horizontal tank filled with water to a very specific dimension.
27:16And the wave action, as it goes back and forth, back and forth, exactly matches the sway of the building.
27:22As the building goes to and fro, the water in the tank goes fro and to.
27:26Four dampners are fitted across the top of the tower, but on their own, they're not enough.
27:34When we look at the building, as the wind from its strongest direction looks at it, it's a very, very narrow building.
27:42This tells us with your eye why wind forces blowing it in this direction creates a very large engineering challenge for this tower.
27:50Their solution is a first for the team and the city.
27:56So there are some structural elements in this building that we have never done before.
28:01The radical idea is to create what in the trade is called a blow-through.
28:07Putting a blow-through here at the widest part of the upper stem of the building, 25 feet tall, it's effectively two stories tall.
28:17There's no glass, there's no interior slab, there's no interior walls.
28:21The wind that's hitting above that goes down and goes through it.
28:25The wind that's just coming straight through goes through.
28:28And the wind that's coming across the building can also go through.
28:31So it just takes away that added lateral load on the building.
28:38With the tower stabilized, all that remains is to cover it in the color-graded glass that changes from light to dark blue-green every 12 floors.
28:48In September 2021, having cost a billion U.S. dollars, the St. Regis Chicago is finally complete.
29:03At 1,191 feet and 101 stories, it claims its crown as the city's third tallest building.
29:15What do I think that St. Regis Tower brings to Chicago?
29:18I think it brings a world-class building.
29:20It's world-class architecture, and it really puts us on a map.
29:24Inside, the 192 hotel rooms and 393 apartments take advantage of its extraordinary location.
29:34Our guests have unmatched views of the city, the lake, the river, and then they also have a ton of natural light that floods into the building.
29:43To say that the views are breathtaking is just, it's a complete understatement.
29:49Thanks to the way the three towers are staggered in height, they come with an added advantage.
29:56We can use the rooftops of those stepping-down elements for the pool, for the gardens, for the outdoor space.
30:03Above all, the building's unique nature-inspired shape creates an organic, flowing facade, enhanced by the changes in the colored glass, which reflect the blues of the surrounding lake and sky.
30:17A true visual masterpiece in a city of skyscrapers.
30:25When you add that iconic building to an already immaculate and perfect skyscape, it makes it all that much better.
30:34It makes me proud to be able to be part of this city with such an important architectural history.
30:41Some building designs are so ahead of the curve, they transcend the reason they were built in the first place, becoming works of art themselves.
31:00One such treasure is found in Paris, France.
31:03An architectural statement so bold, so controversial and innovative, it deserves to hang on a museum wall itself.
31:10Except, come on, that'd be impossible.
31:13It's an enormous building.
31:13It'd be like trying to frame the Eiffel Tower.
31:20When architects compete, history gets made.
31:25Architectural competitions have inspired some of history's greatest buildings, from the iconic Dome of Florence's Cathedral to the Sydney Opera House in Australia.
31:34In Paris, France, both the Palais Garnier and the Eiffel Tower are competition winners that help make the city stand out.
31:44But in the late 60s, it's looking for something new.
31:49It's lost its place at the center of the cultural universe to New York.
31:54They decide the solution is a building so extraordinary, it will bring the world's attention back home.
31:59So the city launches a bold international competition to design an art center.
32:27For the first time ever, it will be open to architects from outside France.
32:33Up-and-coming English and Italian architects Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano can't resist the challenge.
32:40This was a big, big competition.
32:42We are young, bad boys.
32:44So when we saw this competition, we said, let's make a bit of a bit of drama.
32:51Out of 681 entries, their submission is number 493.
33:01It's a futuristic vision to make Paris a new cultural powerhouse.
33:06Its radical experimental design sprawls over 10 stories and 1.1 million square feet to create a space that is utterly flexible.
33:15It must be free, supporting columns and walls using traditional buildings, despite having floors as big as two American football fields.
33:26So they have to work out how to stop it from falling down.
33:31Then they've got to find somewhere to put all the services that would be hidden in the internal walls and columns of a traditional building.
33:37When their design wins, no one is more shocked than Rogers and Piano.
33:46When we won a competition, we got a press conference.
33:51Nobody can speak French.
33:53I got my school French.
33:55As language, I mean, very bad.
33:58And I went on for 15 minutes.
34:00Everybody was absolutely mad about that.
34:05Architect Alan Stanton becomes part of the team.
34:10A lot of us were in our 20s or early 30s, so we had limited experience.
34:15But what we did have was massive energy and kind of commitment and enthusiasm and, I think, creative skills.
34:23Having won, they now have to turn their extraordinary idea into a reality.
34:28Nothing like this had ever been attempted.
34:30But the architects were young, confident and fearless.
34:33Nothing seemed impossible.
34:37In early 1972, work starts on the five-acre site in the heart of the city.
34:45The amount of excavation was huge.
34:48They dug this huge hole.
34:50And we've got to fill it up with something.
34:54Amazingly, they break ground without finalizing the details of how to build it.
34:58I do remember looking down this hole and thinking, God, we haven't sorted the structure out.
35:07I remember suddenly feeling just a slight twang of panic with that.
35:12Not really surprising, given the challenges inherent in the design.
35:16The philosophy was, make something that's not intimidating.
35:21It's a place for art and culture for everybody.
35:26There was a feeling that this was a building for everybody.
35:30And we'd like people to go there.
35:32And there'd always be something different going on.
35:34There'd always be some sort of event, something changing.
35:37So we needed to have a building that had the possibility of putting almost any sort of exhibition or event in there.
35:47The revolutionary idea is to create a huge open plan space without a single interior column.
35:55At the time, asking this is like asking for the impossible.
36:00That was the whole challenge.
36:01You couldn't have a better challenge as an engineer because the engineering was going to make the building.
36:10In Paris, France, the designers of the new Pompidou Center must figure out how to create an entirely open plan art space.
36:18The first problem was how to span almost 50 meters without any intermediate vertical elements.
36:27They turned to an engineering technique not normally seen in buildings.
36:33Bridges often use warring trusses.
36:36These types of structures have two beams, a top cord and a bottom cord with triangular shapes in the middle.
36:45Triangles are nature's most stable shape.
36:49So they keep the structure rigid with no wobble or sag, even across huge spans.
36:57The problem, though, is that where you attach your truss, it creates a huge force trying to pull the support inwards.
37:04On a bridge, long spans are often stabilized by tying them directly into the ground diagonally with huge weights.
37:16But at Pompidou, you can't do that in the usual way because you can't afford to eat into the public space.
37:24So they design custom-fabricated cast steel rocker beams known as gerberettes.
37:30The heavy truss sits on one end and pushes the seesaw down, and naturally, the other end tries to fly upward, but it can't because it's held in place by a vertical tie rod that runs straight down into the ground.
37:46It's an experiment, and one that goes wrong.
37:50Initial tests on these gerberettes were a disaster.
37:53Several of them broke under the load, so they had to rethink and modify the casting process in order to make the steel more ductile.
38:05After that, all the beams took the load and therefore could be signed off as being ready to put into place.
38:13Finally, the bespoke megatrusses are ready to be transported from their factory in Germany to the site in Paris.
38:24Not something to be done in rush hour.
38:28It was a logistical nightmare.
38:31The pieces were so big, they only managed to bring them in one at a time in the dead of night.
38:37During the day, the huge pieces of cast steel are craned into position.
38:43The whole thing was put together by about eight men, and it was like a giant constructor kit.
38:51Et petit à petit, on a vu l'architecture sortir de terre, et tout le monde prouvé ça bizarre.
39:00Even a child can look at the building and understand how it works, and why it comes together, piece by piece.
39:13Finally, the massive floors are in.
39:20But on April 2nd, 1974, President Pompidou dies.
39:25The entire project is under threat.
39:30Pompidou was replaced by Valéry Giscard d'Estaing.
39:34He hated the design for the Pompidou Centre.
39:39Thousands of hours of design, two years of grueling on-site work, is all at serious risk.
39:46There was a moment where we were all terribly worried that it was not going to get built.
39:56What saved us was that all the building contracts had been lit, and it was impossible to reverse that.
40:03So the building had to go ahead.
40:05The team moves on to bring the architect's vision to life.
40:11When it was this, I dream of making building like machine.
40:16Gautiful machine, useful machine, urban machine.
40:20It's like a motor bicycle.
40:23It's like something that you can understand how it works.
40:27But there's a terrible realization.
40:31Without internal walls, flames could rapidly spread.
40:34Heating the exposed steel beams to dangerous temperatures.
40:38Weakening their structural integrity.
40:40They figure out that in a fire, the metal columns would lose their structural integrity and the building collapse.
40:48Normally you have two hours to evacuate people.
40:51So that was the requirement.
40:53They could case the columns in an inflammable material.
40:57But the architects want the building structure to be exposed.
41:01So they need another solution.
41:04The concept there was to fill them with water.
41:07So the water would cool them.
41:08But if you had enough heat on it, the danger was that any air in them would expand and blow the water out.
41:16So there was a pump at the top.
41:18If there was a fire, it started circulating the water.
41:21From our point of view, the steel would be sufficient with the water system to resist the potential fire that could happen in the building.
41:32But the Pompidou still wasn't done breaking rules.
41:38Rogers and Piano decided all the essential services, electricity, plumbing, heating, would sit exposed on the building's exterior, freeing interior space completely.
41:48Normally, services are hidden.
41:50Here, it is one of the key aesthetics of the building, and therefore they have to be absolutely perfect.
41:55To do that, they make them part of the design, including color-coding the pipes, blue for ventilation, green for plumbing, and red for the walkway and escalators.
42:08The idea was to animate the architecture.
42:12The escalator system was part of what we referred to as streets in the sky, if you like.
42:20After five and a half years of construction, in January 1977, Piano and Rogers Pompidou Center opens its doors.
42:30It's not love at first sight.
42:31It's taken some getting used to, but now, it's world famous.
42:47Looking back at it today, you can only say the result is extraordinary and something I'm extremely proud of.
42:54It's not just an icon.
42:56It's a building that works the way its creators hoped it would.
42:59Pompidou was conceived as a place for people.
43:04That is really the spirit of the building.
43:06And people come from all over.
43:10It's very fascinating to see this kind of building because it's really unique.
43:16I simply adore it.
43:17So every year I come here, and I go up as a personal ritual.
43:24The Pompidou still welcomes millions each year.
43:27It has kept its promise to be open, unexpected, alive.
43:33And more than anything, it's for all to enjoy.
43:37You're making cities better places.
43:40And people better people.
43:42Because it's about staying together.
43:45It's about enjoying and sharing the same values, the same emotion.
43:50So that was in play, in very important.
43:53So that was in play, in very important.